In our previous article, [prev] we have reviewed a little about the importance of on-page SEO on a website to be able to provide the right information to search engines or search engines.
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This time webperusahaan.com provide some On-Page SEO tips that don’t require special skills, with regards to naming URLs, subfolders or files.
1. In subfolders and file naming, use dash (-) instead of underscore (_)
- Good structure: http://www.domain.com/sub-folder/file-name.htm
- Poor structure: http://www.domain.com/sub_folder/file_name.htm
The structure with (_) is usually used by programmers to write down some programmer’s terms, search engines tend to see the underline as a Series, or joiner, so technical terms like FTP_BINARY will appear on the search results page. Google understands a sentence with a dash (-) as a single sentence with a separate word, while a sentence with an underscore (_) is understood as a single whole word without a separator:
Extra-Lux Bag -> by Google will be understood as “Extra Lux Bag” separately
tas_extra_lux -> by Google will be understood as “tasextralux”, as a single word, of course you don’t want your website to be classified as a slime web right? :-/
- If you are going to create a website, and the words you use as a domain name require separation then select or search for a domain with a dash hyphen.
- If you already have a website with an underscore but not too much content, we recommend using a 301 redirect (contact your webmaster for this) or using the URL change facility on the google webmaster tool page.
- If you have used so many underscores on your website that is large enough, then do not use it again in the future.
For the SEO benefits itself, you can put one or two keywords in it, but remember, don’t have too many.
2. Whenever possible, avoid using hyphens in domain names.
In the previous point, we knew that it is better to use dash (-) than underscore (_), but if you want to create a new domain, it will be much better without hyphens, because search engines like Google can already recognize the sentences you use in the domain name. The use of hyphens will only add unimportant characters. Remember, the fewer characters in a domain name, the more open the potential for better rankings in the eyes of search engines.
However, back to what keywords you want to include in your new domain. Don’t let there be words or keywords in the domain that contain pornography when put together (without hyphens), for example you want to use the keyword “cheap bag” and decide to include it in the domain name as “extra cheap bag”, if the three words are put together, it will be “tasextracheap”, of course we don’t recommend this, because google also recognizes that your domain contains pornographic keywords, even if it is only one word. For such an example, use dash dashes.
3. In subfolders or permalinks, and file naming, use only lowercase letters, numbers and dash dashes. Avoid using characters outside of these three types of characters.
For example, maybe you have encountered mp3 download links with %20 characters in the URL address, for example “http://www.lagu.com/anji%20berhenti%20di%20kamu.mp3”, this is because the website that contains the song uses “spaces” in the naming of the file, actually the file is named “anji stop in kamu.mp3”. Why is that?
Since browsers such as firefox, chrome or opera automatically interpret spaces in link addresses (URLs) with the character “%20”, this is because they use the same set of characters to replace spaces when spaces are typed in the address bar. This is not a problem if your website also uses the same set of characters, so that the links (URLs) that have spaces in them are displayed and understood as spaces by the browser you are using.
But the problem is, if the link (URL) is “located” on a website with a different set of characters? Like Arabic, Russian or Chinese?, this can be understood differently by the browser, because it is read according to the Arabic page set characters If the set characters are Arabic, then the browser will understand the entire website page using the Arabic character set, as well as search engines that convert Arabic links with different character sets.
It’s not easy to understand, but it’s much safer if we use dashes instead of spaces.
The same is true for lowercase and uppercase letters, situsanda.com/Halaman-Depan situsanda.com/halaman-depan is understood by browsers as 2 different URLs, but by search engines, the URLs are automatically converted to lowercase letters, if the page is indexed by the search engine and you click, then you will find a blank page 404 or page not found, because you are actually using uppercase letters in it. So just look for the safety by using the characters “a – z” or “0 – 9” only.