My Travels on the Net

In a recent issue of High Rankings Advisor, Jill Whelan answered a question from a reader who was worried about potential ramifications from changing the page names of his company website. He was changing them so they would include keywords in the name in the expectation that keywords in the URL’s would improve the website’s rankings.

(For those of you new to search engine optimization, DO NOT change the page names of your website without consulting a professional. It is not a decision to take lightly. It would be the same as if you changed your phone number on a whim and didn’t tell anyone. That would make it tough for clients and prospects to find you wouldn’t it?)

In Jill’s reply she cautioned the reader against it for several reasons most of which boiled down to her belief that the perceived benefits of keywords in page names were actually due to other factors that got ascribed to the new page names. I think the most valid point she makes is that although web pages in the top of the search results often have key words in the page name, someone is intentionally trying to get that page to rank well and are probably doing many things to improve its rankings.

Now I’m not entirely sure I agree with her but Jill is a well respected expert in SEO so I definitely have to give her opinion a lot of credence. One thing I did learn from the post was that if you’re going to use keywords in your page names, separate them with hyphens instead of underscores. Rats. I’ve been using underscores. I think they make the page name easier to read but apparently Google doesn’t read an underscore as a word separator but they do with hyphens. Oh well, what Google wants, Google gets.

Labels: High Rankings Advisor, Jill Whelan, keywords, page names