Keywords in page names

[Wynnefield]

i am currently at odds with a peer, who is telling me that page names are not as relevant as i believe them to be. in other words, when referring to a web site for a local pet shop, i would prefer specific names such as:

reptile_supplies.aspx
live_reptile_food.aspx
tropical_fish.aspx

rather than template names (with relevant title tages) such as:

full_image.aspx
half_image.aspx
two_column.aspx

please share your thoughts, and any references on this topic would be very much appreciated.

thank you,

wynne

[SiteExpress]

Most of my reading says that it is important, and besides, what does it hurt?

[ian]

Different search engines work in different ways, but I would definitely use search relevant page URL's.

[Wynnefield]

thank you for your feedback (and confiming what i already beleived to be true) ...

[RAJO]

relevant page url for sure
for many reasons one of them is to make it easy for you in organizing your work

[medlington]

I hope it matters because it took me a good few hours to go through my site and re-index every page so that they had relavant urls

[ISDProductions]

it not as important as other factors...but yes, it is important for overall success

[Wynnefield]

Well, I lost the battle, as we were delivered a dynamically generated site with a "quirky" content management system, so the only page I can update via DW is the index page.

I plan to take advantage of other aspects of keywords, i.e. strong page titles, lots of relevant alt text and of course, the ever present meta tags ...

thanks for keeping this thread alive ...

[fairdoes]

Relevant page (and directory) names can help, especially for kindly folks who post links to your site without text.
Much more important is the url text - famously, a search for 'complete failure' on google recently turned up gwbush.com; 'complete failure' isn't in the metas, the title, the text, the url or anything, but thousands of folks have posted links to the site with that url text!

P.S. This thread could live forever - SEO gets fascinating when it starts to pay ...

[Wynnefield]

I was wondering how that got so popular. Now I understand. When I develop a new web site for a client, I stress the need to have related web sites and/or partners place inbound text links to my client's site, as I believe this is the third most critical SEO factor with the URL being number one and the title being number two ...

Wynne