Keywords in filenames

Hi all,

One of the main parts of our website is our news section. We're a hobbyist/enthusiast website, and add related news most days. Since the site's inception in 2005, we've used the date as the filename (i.e. mysite.com/news/04-12-06.asp).

I've been considering changing these to the title of the news story, a'la Wordpress. When writing the stories, we try to use our relevant keywords in the story titles for SEO reasons anyway, so by changing our filenames it would help organisation, and possibly have some sort of SEO benefit. I've checked Aaron Wall's book, as well as the latest SEOmoz guide, and opinion is pretty divided. I realise it's not a major SEO practice that needs employing, but I realise that every little helps and with a good couple of hundred pages it may be worth renaming them. We also have a news index which links to the news stories using the headline (including keywords) as the anchor text, so it seems that the only piece of the puzzle we're missing in this area is the filenames.

What do you guys reckon?

You are correct when you say that "it's not a major seo practice"

But changing the url to incorporate possible keywords does have some good effects.

Like you mentioned before, it provides a better organizational structure base to your site.

Another would be that when people are trying to get to a certain file/article on your site, they only need to type in the address and then the article name at the end, instead of typing a random number sequence followed by a file extension.

For the seo purposes, i have mixed results when using full names for articles and sticking with the file extension option.

If you had keywords in the article name that is incorporated into the url, then this will help only minorly in your seo of your site.

You must remember that although it can help if you have keywords in your url, it is not the main factor for ranking well.

Incorpartion of keywords in URL is not only factor of ranking well in SE; many other factors are there in SEO process which have great impact on SE rankings.....

But having keywords in URL is also nice.. but this doesn't means to alter the URL to incorporate Keypharses which URL are well in SE ranking....

I would recommend to use this practice. Did you notice that Google put keywords in file names in bold font in SERPs? It was also recommended by Stephan Spencer from Netconcepts during last web seminar I was attending.

yes i knew that.

they also bold keywords that appear in the domains as well.

be carefull though
if you are already enjoying traffic to those pages from the search engines try to redirect the old URLs to the New ones so you won't have a drop in the search engine results pagses (SERPs)

That can probably accomplished using htaccess redirections (301 redirects)

a 301 redirect would be the best option if you were going to do old domain pointing to new ones with out risking any seo technicallities. <- spell check?

also relating back to the main question here;

with the new file name extensions you are wanting to do with wordpress, would you be changing the url of all articles on your website? or just articles that are published from a new starting date.

you should remember if you have backlinks going to those past articles you will have to also update those links so that you still receieve some benefit from having backlinks that actually do point to a real location on your site.

I have used the main keyword in my file names for a year or so and it has been a big help. Every page on my site has the main keyword in the file name.