Will this make a difference in my website? A question to web-savvy promoters...

I have a random question I want to ask the community.

I have written a number of articles related to legal topics, and many are on my website. If I may eschew humility, people seem to enjoy them, and I would like a wider audience. When I created the html for these pages, I named them awkwardly, and am wondering if more intuitive naming would make them more likely to come up in google searches. If so, what works?

For example, I have a simple article that explains the difference between a trade name and a trademark.

I named it article_tradename.html. Which of the following (if any) is likely to help it catch fire on google, since a lot of people want to know the difference...

TrademarksVersusTradeNames.html

trademarksversustradenames.html

trademarks-versus-tradenames.html

Does anybody know if naming conventions matter here?

Danny Bronski/IP Lawyer

5 Bizniks have posted replies

Posted by Frank Wong, San Francisco/ El Cerrito, California | Sep 10, 2007

Danny,

Yes, naming of files does make a difference. There are certainly many different ideas on what is the best but I tend to stick with fully readable names such as trademarks-versus-tradenames.html.

Frank
Posted by Tony Wright, Seattle, Washington | Sep 11, 2007

Hi Danny.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/ranking-factors-version-2-released

Give that a good read-- there are a lot of factors that can effect your findability in search engines.

One thing to be sure of is which keywords and keyphrases are searched for more. There are some pretty advanced tools out there for this, but there's a nice easy/free option with Google Trends:

http://www.google.com/trends

Hope that helps!

-T
Posted by Mark Silver, Portland, Oregon | Sep 11, 2007

In addition to what's been suggested, you want to get those articles out there! You can submit them to article banks, you can even use services that will distribute your articles to hundreds of article directories, all with links back to your website.

We publish a new article every Wednesday, and then, a week later, have it distributed in this way. We have subscribers coming from all over.

Can working on your business nourish your heart?
Posted by Dan McComb, Seattle, Washington | Sep 11, 2007

Just an FYI to everyone, we're working to add article publishing to Biznik, so that you can post business-related articles, tips, etc. to Biznik, and get them seen by the whole community. Further, the community will be able to vote on which articles are the most helpful, and the top-ranked articles will be the most visible.

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Posted by Dan McComb, Seattle, Washington | Sep 11, 2007

Danny, it does make a difference - the order in particular is important. Put the most relevant term first, and like others here have suggested, keep it human readable. Popular blog formats like WordPress use this-standard-convention (separate the terms with hyphens). That's what we use on Biznik, and works very well for us - we get excellent SEO results using it. And so do you - type in seattle intellectual property attorney in Google, and your Biznik profile comes up #14, while your own website does not appear in the first 100 results, for what it's worth.

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