Site Directory Naming Convention
Often a new site's naming convention is dictated by the software engine or database that powers the back end. While that may be convenient for your programmer, it is not good site building practice for SEO and your users.

Part 2 – Planning With Naming in Mind

Nomenclature – A site URI web address that looks like www.your site.com/?=zlsi43yrsbc is missing a large search engine signal as to what the indicated page is all about. Compare that to www.yoursite.com/widgets or even www.yoursite.com/index.php?tpl=widgets These naming conventions are both easier for search engine spiders to understand and more importantly, for your readers to understand.

Now the "official" word from the search engines is that they parse and understand any sort of web address that you use. While that may be the case, the reality is that we see over and over that the best rankings are for sites with easy to understand naming conventions.

In competitive business niches, sometimes we are competing with other SEO teams who are matching us step for step in optimizing. We've seen that this seemingly small change (easy to setup beforehand — a ton of work once the site is already online!) can allow us to rank better.

An important part of this process is to map out in advance, what categories of site sections you are going to have. There are the obvious: about us, privacy policy, etc. pages as well as the different aspects of your business. How do you decide what to name them?

For many of the businesses that I've worked for over the years, the naming of sections use accepted industry jargon. Why not, everyone in the business uses the same language right? Over and over, I've seen after doing keyword research that the customers do not use the same words! Going with the industry jargon is costing you money.

In my opinion, it is critical to do or have done keyword research prior to deciding on your naming of site sections. If you use the words and descriptions that new customers use when searching, your site will rank higher, sooner and easier.

Plan your naming convention to be easy for customers to understand and the search engines will like it better too!

In Part 3 we will address keyword research.

How about you, what do you think?