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SEO advice

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Dizzydiza

New Member
As a small hobby business with very little money coming in I have created my own website using a wysiwyg programme. I am always trying to tweak it by reading various SEO tips that people kindly give in forums such as this. I am once again trying to do small tweaks and my question is as follows.
Should my web page title be the same as what I have saved my web page as or is it better to give it a fuller title than what I have saved it as.
e.g my Combs.htm is called Feathered Beaded Combs and Crowns in the title bar. Is that the best way to do it or should I save my web page as FeatherBeadedCombs&Crowns.htm.
Also should I use capital letters when saving my webpage or should I have them all in small letters e.g combs.htm in stead of Combs.htm
Looking forward to your advice
Diana :)

PS the reason for my questions is that I am going to try and create a site map to submit to google.
Is this the best site to do it with
http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/
It says I should host this file in my public folder ...is that the same as my httpdocs folder?
 
Mike Lewis

Mike Lewis

New Member
Diana,

I am not an SEO expert, so will not try to answer your questions in that area.

However, regarding your question about using capital letters, be aware that some web servers are case-sensitive when it comes to file names. In other words, they would treat Combs.htm and combs.htm as two separate files. If you named your file Combs, and the user typed combs, they would not find it.

For that reason, it's generally advisible to stick to lower case throughout.

Mike
 
Gordon N

Gordon N

New Member
I agree with Mike on the capitals question, I would recommend all lowercase - it makes creating links to other pages easier as you will know that there should be no capitals in the filename.

I have used xml-sitemaps in the past and they were okay, it's worth having a scan through the file afterwards to make sure that it has caught everything you want, and remove anything you don't want. Your httpdocs is your root public folder, and your right that it would be best placed there.
 
businesses for sale

businesses for sale

New Member
Best not to have an ampersand in the main part of the URL. Also I would separate the words with dashes i.e. FeatherBeadedCombs&Crowns.htm would change to feather-beaded-combs-crowns.htm
 
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Dizzydiza

New Member
I had to look up ampersand :blushing: Thank you another good piece of advice.
 
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Dizzydiza

New Member
My other concern for asking about the name of the htm document being the same as the title is then as indicated above, if I call the htm document feather-beaded-combs.htm then the url looks untidy. Instead of being www.dizatiaras.co.uk/combs.htm it would be www.dizatiaras.co.uk/feather-beaded-combs.htm and the page title would be Feather Beaded Combs and Crowns. Or is it better for me to name the htm document as fully as that so that it picks up on all that I do?

How do I remove the hyper links in this post as they are not genuine pages?
 
Canary Dwarf

Canary Dwarf

New Member
Diana

All what has been said so far is good: stick with lower case for consistency, separate words with hyphens, echo the page title and title tag with your filename.

Whether you use the full page title in your file name will depend on your keywords. If 'feather beaded' is being used in searches for your products, it's as well to have it in the file name. If not, and your customers are just searching for 'combs', then it doesn't matter.
 
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Dizzydiza

New Member
Ok created a site map for my website using google. I have it on my webmaster tools in Google analytic's. According to the information on the webmaster tools page it says the following which is then followed by a big red cross

Your Sitemap appears to be an HTML page. Please use a supported sitemap format instead.

I thought I had followed all the instructions correctly ...clearly I have done something wrong. What format does it want me to follow?
All advice greatly appreciated
Diana x
 
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Dizzydiza

New Member
Ok the problem was at line 2 of the webpage. There was an extra html tag which has now been removed and I have resubmitted the site map to google, so hopefully its sorted.
 
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