? dash, unscore, html, shtml - url formatting

[Kimberlh]

My site use to be very well found on search engines back when I made all my own pages use frontpage. I use to get a lot of traffic but since I moved to a content manger my sites been getting worse and I am standing out on a ledge ready to JUMP!! My main .com hold a high position when searched but none of my other page inside the content manager are being found.

I been reading for a week now on url formatting. And found many say not to use underscored but they I will turn around and find more articles that says it does not matter.

I am finding articles talking about programming and how search engine read - as part of the english languages and _ as programming and I admit I am way in over my head understand this stuff.

Can I please have input on how much the - and _ matter or if better to make you url with words and not spaces? Does upper and lower case matter?
Does the shtml and html make any real difference?

EVEN if I do all the work and changes will it matter or will the rule just change again in three months? :eek:

I am sure this has been talking about before but I missed the boat on this one and treading in water over my head trying to get how much what really matters on url format.

Thank very very very very very much if I can get some input in old women english.

Kimberly

[scragar]

The hyphen/underscore debate is a matter of user problems, will the user be able to remember a URL afterwards, hyphens are normally rather good for breaking up words in such a way, but hyphens normally look better in the URL bar, it's just that people mistake them for spaces, which causes problems.

It's better to use real words and descriptive URLs, mysite.com/products/phones reads much better than mysite.com/list?cat=2 and will give you a high search engine rank. If you are losing out on search engine ranking then you might need to take a look over a googletrends (http://trends.google.com) and see why you aren't matching the keywords people are searching for.

[Kimberlh]

Thanks, at least know I know where I got the _ idea. It was too look better on the url bar. I knew at some time I heard that _ was better. Thank you for letting me know I had not totally lost my mind.

However I think I going to go with dash. Most my return traffic has always been remembering the main .com name so I am not going to worry about the url looking good.

You can't do everything to please everyone so I am going to worry about search engines finding me like they use to because this new content manager was set for auto url underscore which can be changed.

Thank you very much for your time
Kimberly