Page Names - How Important?

Page Names and search engines and page rankings

[Andrewmartin54]

How important is the individual file names of each page on ones site for search engines and page rankings? Example:

www.xyz.com/dolphinjewelry.html

We are starting our second e-commerce site and it would be very easy for easy for us to use the product code for the file name:

www.xyz.com/tr939.html

But with some extra work we could make each page name something with meaning and full of keywords.

Do you think it worth the extra work?

Thanks in advance for the advice,

Andrew

[Mohamed_E]

Welome to WebmasterWorld, Andrewmartin54!

I believe that there is some advantage to using descriptive file names, but not a big advantage. So I am careful to use descriptive names for new files, but do not spend any effort renaming existing ones.

Opinions differ, just my two cents worth :)

[Tony_Perry]

like everything to do with SEO on their own they won'y make any difference. However, used as just part of the cake in conjucntion with everything else they do matter. Seperate the words with underscore.

[Monkscuba]

Most of our pages have descriptive file names. It surely looks better as the user can see this in the SERPs. Better to see "www.useful-site.com/bluewidgets.htm" than "www.useful-site.com/p45t8.htm"

As for underscore...Our site uses underscores so we have filenames like : useful_information.htm

A competitor swears by using the "-" and some of their files are ridiculously long like:

www.thatsite.com/widgets-texas-blue-widget-information-dallas-prices.htm

That seems a trifle over the top and IMO doesn't look nice, but they swear it will help in SE rankings.

[Mohamed_E]

I believe that a hyphen is more appropriate than an underscore. There have been many threads on this subject, see for example [webmasterworld.com...]

A Google site search for hyphen underscore [google.com] turns up over 80 threads, a very popular topic ;)

[Web Footed Newbie]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld, Andrewmartin54!

Below is the quick rank point system developed by Brett Tabke of WebmasterWorld. Hope this helps:

Inbound link text: 10 points.
title: 10 points
domain name: 7 points
large h1-h2 headings: 5 points
first sentence of first paragraph 5 points
path or filename: 4 points
proximity (multi kws): 4
beginning of a sentence 1.5 points
bold or italic text: 1 points
usage in text: 1 point
title attribute: 1 point
alt tag: .5 point
meta descrip: .5 points
meta keywords: .05 point

Good luck, WFN :)