SEO World:

Strategies, tips and insider information on SEO

By Jon Rognerud

In my recent article, the 6 SEO blogging tips, I speak of the awesome opportunities that exist for you to combine a Wordpress blog with some common sense business strategies and tools to get into a positive place for search engine inclusion and ranking.

This is only the beginning. There are more tips you can apply that will help you further. (A recent video from Matt Cutts, Google – is posted at the end).

Directories & filenames with underscores?
We know that directory and filenames are important to search engines. The ongoing discussion around hyphens and underscores was recently discussed at a conference where the below video was taped. Google is looking into how to best deal with underscores, but having an underscore in your URL like this: /sony_digital_camera is normally read by Google as ’sonydigitalcamera’, whereas /sony-digital-camera (hyphens) is correctly interpreted as ’sony digital camera’. This last example make it easy for the search engines to read it.

Worrying about this too much may cause headaches for an already established site (possibly losing established rankings) – but if you are building new pages, use the hyphen approach and with keywords in URL and domain, where you can. The (+) plus sign and dots (.) can also be used, but stay away from underlines.

Dynamic pages are good?
If you are dealing with dynamic pages (sometimes called spider-traps) that contain long URLs separated by many ‘&’ characters, you will not be considered optimized for Google. In fact, if you have more than two parameters, you are losing indexing and ranking opportunities. Stay within 1-2 parameters max, something like this: http://www.yourdomain.com?z=parm1&y=parm2 – and you will be treated like a static URL. Dynamic pages are not good for SE’s.

In that recent blog article, I speak of the directory levels that can be set within the Wordpress system. I used the date driven structure. The structure creates a deeper level tree, but you can also test using the category page only, and applying a POST Slug (Wordpress) to name your directory specifically. (The post slug option is down/right side of the page, when you are in ‘Write’ mode on Wordpress). Either way, recent tests show that spiders will drill down and find your page.

Check out the (long) video and see how you can apply further techniques – as instructed from the top (Google)…

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 8th, 2007 at 11:04 am and is filed under SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.