page name?

boxerdog · Jan 5, 2010

just making a site but am unsure on a couple of things:

do i use the page name as html title?
or specify html title?

also

file name: index html <-do i change that on any of the pages?

thanks guys

Admin · Jan 5, 2010

The title will be the page name although the HTML filename can be different.

Whatever page you call index.html is the one the webserver will use as the homepage

newguy · Jan 5, 2010

As admin states, the page file can be different to the page title. For instance the page file could be index.html but the title could be 'Gold Watches'.

Assuming that your pages are to be placed in the same directory, you will of course need to use different filenames for the various pages.

index.html
products.html
contact.html

etc

boxerdog · Jan 5, 2010

thanks for the help, but my head is banging and i have lost the will to live.
dont know if i have done it right or not? its here: (not completed)

Motorhomes For Hire | The UK Directory

woopwoop · Jan 6, 2010

Not sure what you meant by "page name" in your first post but I'll try and help you out with the following terms which you need to know:

(a) file name
(b) page title
(c) page description
(d) page keywords
*Each of these can be different for every page on your website. They don't have to be, but often you can bring in the unique aspects of each page into the above elements so that you rank better in the search engines.

What you've done so faris a really good start and here are a couple of tips to make it even better:

1. Your homepage has a block of text which is an image. This is how I first started doing sites, but you should try not to. Have text as text, that way Google and the other search engines can read it and know more about your site - this will help you get search engine traffic.

2. In your contact page, you have an email address. This time, you might want to think about either just having the contact form, or even having your email address as an image. This is because websites are constantly being scraped by bots looking to harvest email addresses to spam later. You'll save yourself a lot of spam deleting if you change this.

Let's use your "about us" page as an example for the following points:

3. You have your page title which is useful:

Your page title is "about motorhomes for hire" and this comes from this bit of your html code:

HTML:

<title>about motorhomes for hire</title>

You may want to do things like use capitals, add keywords, include the website name. For example:

HTML:

<title>About US | Motorhomes for Hire</title>

Page titles are important as they are the thing that Google reads and interprets first. They are also the first line in the Google search results. Therefore, the more appealing they are, the more likely people will click them.

4. Your page description is missing on this page. Along with the page title, the page description must be somewhere between the <head> and </head> tags in your code. It is very important as Google also reads this to find out more about your site and ranks your website accordingly. The page description is also very likely to be the text under the link in Google's search results.
You may want to add a description similar to this:

HTML:

<meta name="description" content="National Motorhome Directory. Search motorhome listings to find the perfect vehicle and list your motorhome for free." />

5. You could also include the keywords code, although this isn't used by most search engines any more - it's tradition to use it though!

HTML:

<meta name="keywords" content="motorhome, motor home, caravan, motorhome directory, motorhome database" />

6. File name is also very important for SEO purposes. This may have been what you were asking about in your first post.
Your "About" page has the following link/url

HTML:

http://www.motorhomesforhire.co.uk/page5.html

Therefore it's filename is page5.html

This needs to be changed. You're missing a valuable opportunity to again, tell Google what you are about, and also to distinguish each page on your website. (Relevant file names really do help with search engine rankings).

For your "about us" file name, you may want to use something like:

about-motorhome-directory.html

This may be a good filename for this page because it distinguishes itself from other pages on your website (as it has "about" in there) and you have used another opportunity to have your keywords. Great for search engines. Plus website visitors expect to see descriptive file names as part of the url.

So instead of using file names like:
page1.html
page2.html
page3.html
page4.html

Use:
about-motorhome-directory.html
contact-national-motorhomes.html
advertise-motorhomes.html
motorhome-links.html

These are more descriptive, they are good for search engines and your users.

Try to mix up the file names, page titles and page descriptions using relevant and varying keywords.

Finally, once you have changed the file names, make sure that you change your navigation bar's links on every page to have the new links. Changing the nav bar on one page wont change the top of every page (unless you're using website software).

Sorry if you know most of this, I know how useful it was when I started building sites and people broke the information down for me.

Good luck

boxerdog · Jan 6, 2010

that is just the type of info i was looking for woopwoop

many thanks for that

redbird · Jan 6, 2010

Make sure you keep one page named index.html, which will be the home page. If you don't then all you will see is a directory listing of the pages you have.

woopwoop · Jan 6, 2010

redbird said:
Make sure you keep one page named index.html, which will be the home page.

^ I knew I forgot the most important thing !

Two more quick things...
You will probably benefit from changing the file names of page6.html - page78.html to something descriptive (eg. bedfordshire-motorhomes.html)

Also another seo tip (I think this is still important) is the "link title text". This is the text that appears in a little yellow box when you put your mouse on a link.
Your nav bar links have this effect but the county links don't.

You achieve it by replacing:

PHP:

<a href="http://www.motorhomesforhire.co.uk/page6.html">Bedfordshire</a>

with:

PHP:

<a href="http://www.motorhomesforhire.co.uk/page6.html" title="Bedfordshire Motorhomes" >Bedfordshire</a>

and if you change the name of the file as mentioned first you'd have this:

PHP:

<a href="http://www.motorhomesforhire.co.uk/bedfordshire-motorhomes.html" title="Bedfordshire Motorhomes" >Bedfordshire</a>

You could mix it up by throwing some other words in the title="" section, maybe just switch the phrase and have title="Motorhomes in Bedfordshire"

All this stuff for SEO and building sites is an ever changing ongoing learning and doing process... but learning the basics now will mean that when you build your next site, you'll do everything I mentioned here by default and then concentrate on other SEO / website content stuff

Admin · Jan 6, 2010

Looking at how many pages you have on the site STOP! and do yourself a favour and install Wordpress.

I hand coded a 300 page site years ago, page-by-page, (for free for my daughters school), took me months and was impossible to update.

It was a great way to learn HTML etc. which I still use that knowledge every day but I'd never do that now!

Wordpress will make editing a synch plus the plug-ins you can add will bring you a lot of features including SEO packs, Visitor statistics, anti-spam measures, themed templates, ......

Admin

newguy · Jan 6, 2010

admin said:
Looking at how many pages you have on the site STOP! and do yourself a favour and install Wordpress.

I hand coded a 300 page site years ago, page-by-page, (for free for my daughters school), took me months and was impossible to update.

It was a great way to learn HTML etc. which I still use that knowledge every day but I'd never do that now!

Wordpress will make editing a synch plus the plug-ins you can add will bring you a lot of features including SEO packs, Visitor statistics, anti-spam measures, themed templates, ......

Admin

Same here. I once created an entertinment themed site, which used a simple html dreamweaver template. At first I thought this was a way to cut down on the workload, but really it just massively resticted what I was able to do with the site. Once you hit 50 pages or thereabouts on a pure html site, you realise that there's effectively no going back now, and if any changes need to be made site wide in areas outside of the templated regins, you have a real struggle on your hands. It's also a nightmare to update the design in such circumstances. Wordpress is the way to go. I've even seen decent blogspot designs recently, although there's always the issue with the URLs not being all that SEO friendly. Still, it's preferable to pure html any day of the week.

boxerdog · Jan 6, 2010

god no, iv come this far im not starting again using WP
slowly making the changes though

newguy · Jan 6, 2010

boxerdog said:
god no, iv come this far im not starting again using WP
slowly making the changes though

Perhaps then on future sites a CMS approach might pay dividents? At least here you've picked up a bit of html knowledge and got some decent advice as to improvements that can be made. For small pages (perhaps under 20 pages), I can see a case for using pure html, as long as it's articles and not much changes. For sites of a dynamic nature though. there may be problems.

Anyway, good luck with the site!