Marketing Medical Practices: File Names And Your Website

Whether marketing medical practices or any other business on the Internet, it's important that you choose your file names wisely. A file name can actually impact your web site promotion, usability, and operating system compatibility, and there are certain things that should and should not be included in a file name.

It's best to decide upon the rules for naming your files and then stick to those rules. One such rule concerns the use of capital letters. In some systems, directory and file names may be capital letter sensitive. As such, the following two URLs would be for two different files:

http://www.drsmith.com/facelift/FaceliftComplications.html
http://www.drsmith.com/facelift/faceliftcomplications.html

It's often best to stick with only lower-case letters when naming your files. This decreases the chance of coding errors and users typically have an easier time if directly typing the URL into their browser. Unfortunately, using all lower-case letters can make URLs harder to read and to remember, in which case the underscore symbol or a hyphen might be used as follows:

http://www.drsmith.com/facelift/facelift_complications.html
http://www.drsmith.com/facelift/facelift-complications.html

Ideally, file names should be descriptive, readable and memorable. Never use spaces in your file and directory names as some operating systems have problems with them, which can lead to broken links and error messages. It's also important that you take care when changing or correcting you file names as this can inadvertently create broken links as well. Whenever changing a file name, be sure to update all links to the file you changed on all necessary pages. Whether you decide to capitalize or not, underscore, hyphen or leave it alone, just remember to be consistent and name all of your files following the same rules.

File names are also important when it comes to the search engines. Search engine spiders often index your interior pages and they even look at file names. When naming a file, try to use targeted keywords and keyword phrases that relate to the page's content as this can help your search engine rankings. Hyphens and underscores can come in handy in this regard because spiders often have trouble reading a long string of words, such as informationaboutplasticsurgery.html'. The spider can better interpret and find the keywords in information-about-plastic-surgery.html'.