Page names similar to page titles?

[Robo]

I am trying to get unique page titles on our dynamic php site (now gives the same title for all pages). See also [webmasterworld.com...]

Searching for solutions, I noticed, if I understand correctly, several treads mentioning that page names (file name) or H1 (first header on the page) could-should be similar or close to the page title element as mentioned in <title>...</title>.

When doing the sites few years ago, in naivety we choose easy and as short as possible names. They have some relation to the content, but not much and more for our easy recognition (one step up from 1.php, 2.php etc) then for visitor recognition or SEO. For example, a page about individual stories from immigrants and settlers has the name "stories.php"

Our site does not get much traffic yet but we are now working -for the first time- on SEO/SEF. If all is working properly, we will make a sitemap and start pushing.

1) Does it make sense to change the page file names and, where needed, the H1 now to better reflect the content? Old links we would keep working with a .htaccess redirect.

2)Longer file names containing several words, should they be linked as immigrant-stories,php or immigrant_stories.php

3)Are there restrictions - recommendations on file name length?

I am a non-professional doing our non-profit websites, so all help and comments are highly appreciated.

Robo

[undercoverseo]

Including keywords in your page names has been shown to help, include them whenever possible. It's preferable to use hyphens "-" instead of underscores "_" when saving your page.

As for redirecting from the old to the new pages, you should use 301 redirects in your htaccess file to maintain any search rankings you had for older pages.

You are correct in using H1 tags on your pages. Also don't forget to include your keywords in the copy/text of your web page and in your ALT tags for images (but don't overdo it).

[willybfriendly]

If it is an established site, I would hesitate to change file names and extensions.

However, relevant <title>TITLE</title> tags would be a good change.

W3C recommends that title tag and <h1> match each other. But there is some speculation that this can lead to over-optimization penalties.

[Robo]

It is an established website in a very small circle, with traffic of a river in the desert, that's why we are changing it.

Since we never made a serious effort on SEO-SEF or getting us noticed, I am not that worried about loosing rank or links. For example, a direct search for our website name as "example.org" had only two hits on the first page, both to secondary pages. The rest were all links from forums etc.

Since we are now redoing the structure and changing our dynamic to static urls, I might as well go the whole distance now. Would be a sad joke to find out that I missed some essential points after I include and submitted a sitemap to google and start pushing the site.