Should I change generic links to keyword links?

Iswhite-bread.html better than tip3.html

[kellymonaghan]

On one of my sites I have two collections of articles. Each one has its own "table of contents" page on which the article titles are listed, with links to the articles themselves. These are all internal links within the same site.

The links are all generic. (i.e. tips1.html, tips2.html, etc.)

I'm wondering if it's worth the bother to change the urls to keywords. In other words, if tips2.html is about "white bread", should I change the url to white-bread.html?

My motivation in doing this would be to be more "search engine friendly" and also to improve page rank.

Any thoughts?

[Torben Lundsgaard]

Hi kellymonaghan and welcome to WebmasterWorld

Don't bother it's not worth the trouble. It has very litle if any effect at all. However, short descriptive links are more user friendly.

Torben

[buckworks]

I would go for it, as long as you could do it easily and there weren't a lot of inbound links where you'd need to ask other webmasters for updates.

I think Torben is right that it would only make a small difference, but my theory is that if you can do a few things that each make a .01% difference, it can make a worthwhile difference for competing against millions of other pages.

One place where the change might help significantly would be when other webmasters link to the page just using the URL as the link text. Sooner or later you can expect a few of those. If the URL itself includes a keyword or two, that would make for slightly more advantageous anchor text.

Anchor text "www.yoursite.com/white-bread.html" would pack a bit more punch than "www.yoursite.com/tips1.html".

[kellymonaghan]

Thanks for the insights. It looks like this goes in the "when you can get around to it" folder.