How best to name pages in an organized manner yet SE friendly?

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How best to name pages in an organized manner yet SE friendly?

Put them in folders? Put a letter in front?....

hulahoop

12:32 pm on Jul 28, 2007 (gmt 0)

I am starting to write some articles for my site and would like to know how best to name these pages in a way that is SE friendly yet ensure they are in well organize on the server?

Should I:
1) put all these articles in a folder and give them keyword rich file names?
Eg. folder/keywordrich_article1.html

2) Not put them in a folder but name them say ... a_keywordrich_article1.html, a_keywordrich_article2.html, a_keywordrich_article3.html so they are all organized using an 'a_'. This way it makes it easier to group and search files that are articles only.

3)Lastly, is it better to use "-" or "_"?
Eg...
a-keywordrich-article.html or a_keywordrich_article.html

Any other suggestion is welcome.

Thanks

buckworks

1:27 pm on Jul 28, 2007 (gmt 0)

Strive to end up with concise, meaningful URLs that would make good sense to users. If you manage that, spiders will like them well enough too.

Put articles in a folder of their own and name that folder (and any subfolders) in a way that would add meaning to the finished URLs. Meaningful names make site management easier, as well.

If you're using software that creates file names from the article titles, watch that things don't get silly-long. Try to name individual article files with a word or phrase that reflects the article's content rather than just duplicating the article's title.

If you wrote an article "My Problems with Widgets",

an URL something like

example.com/articles/widget-problems.html

example.com/articles/widgets/problems.html

would be meaningful for both humans and spiders.

Hyphens vs underscores - my personal answer is "slight preference for hyphens but if you're using software that only lets you use underscores don't worry about it."

hulahoop

4:48 am on Jul 31, 2007 (gmt 0)

Hi buckworks,

So you would say 3 is better than 2? Putting in folders with meaningful names would be better than naming files a_widgets.html?

Thanks