Hypens in file names are often better than underscores

Vanessa Fox from the Google Sitemaps team was a guest blogger at Matt Cuff’s blog recently. She gives out several SEO tips which should be useful for those interested in optimising their sites for the Google search engine.

I even find a tip which is new to me such as the hypens vs underscores in file names.

Hypens are often better than underscores.
As an example, african-elephants.html is seen as two words: “African” and “elephants”. african_elephants is seen as one word: african_elephant. Who’s searching for “african_elephant”?

Some of the other tips suggest these

• Make subscription-based site more search engine friendly by using good structuring
• Stay away from flash based site
• Avoid using images as text and navigation
• Include important keywords in file name and content. (This one seems obvious but most people do not bother. Those who do, include the wrong keywords!)

Read full post: Organic Site Review session