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Yes, you can get a ton of extra traffic to your site…with a simple change, using hyphens! Did you know that how you name files and directories on your site can have a huge factor on your search engine rankings? Now before we go into details, you have to understand that search engines are essentially “software robots” and therefore they need things to be easy for them to understand. Say for example you name a image “IMG_2493.JPG”. Most search engines will rank your image’s name as “IMG_2493″. Now, if that image was of kids playing with toys and you had an article on child safety…well, the article would probably get indexed properly by the search engines, but you’re also losing a ton of potential visitors because your image wasn’t named properly.

What’s a good way to name files? Well, since you can’t use spaces in filenames, you need another character to act as a space. This character is, you guessed it, a hyphen. Originally when I was making websites, I used the underscore for filenames. Now, you may not see a big difference between a hyphen and an underscore, but there is a huge difference to search engines. Say you rename our original image from “IMG_2493″ to “kids_playing”. Now if you go to a search engine (after our site has been re-indexed) and search for “kids” or “playing”, or even “kids playing” your site would NOT come up (although, if you searched for “kids_playing”, your site would come up :P). Why won’t your site show up? Because the search engines use the underscore as an alphabet character and not a spacing character. Therefore, you would want to rename your image to “kids-playing”. Now, after your site gets re-indexed and you search for any of the terms of “kids”, “playing” or “kids playing”, your site will be listed.

Now this doesn’t just go for images. This naming practice can be used for any files, or even directories. So, say you have a blog and you have a category of posts called “Domain Names” (like I do), you may want to setup your category directory to be “/domain-names/”. Now if you’re using the blogging software WordPress (or many other blogging software programs or CMS) your software will already convert multi-word categories into directories with hyphens.

You should also note that while this will help index your site, you should also make sure that your images are named and have relevancy to your articles or website. If you use overly long filenames or you name files or directories with names that have nothing to do with your accompanying articles or website, you will be punished by the search engines.

As an extra bonus, I will give you WordPress users out there a huge tip for search engine indexing of your blog. A simple change to your permalinks structure will change things drastically. I’m going to show you how to do this…

In your WordPress admin panel, go to the “Options” tab up top and then select the “Permalinks” tab bellow that.

Within your permalinks options, you may still have your permalinks structure setup as “default”. Default in WordPress is probably the worst possible option you can have setup for a search engine to be able to find things on your site. In your permalinks options, select “Custom:” and use both %category% and %postname% in your permalinks structure. This will allow WordPress to automatically convert your “category” and “post” names into both directories and filenames. This in turn, will allow search engines to index your site very efficiently. I have my permalinks setup like the following image…

You don’t have to have it setup the exact same way as me but at by at least using the %category% and %postname% tags, you will make a huge difference in your linking structure. I only have mine setup with the year, month and day before the other tags because of my personal preference and to make it easier for ME to find my posts.

Well, I hope this post will help you out and if you have any questions on how any of this works or my explanations, ask away! Good luck!

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