SEO File Names/URLs

The address of each page on your site is made up of two things. The domain of the page, and the path to the page withing your hosting.

Domains

On the Spanglefish system we normally create new sites on the domain www.spanglefish.com, or one of a handful of other domains we use which are targeted at specific sectors - eg www.parish-council.com.

So your new website will probably have an address something like

www.spanglefish.com/mywebsite/

where /mywebsite/ is the folder we put your website in on our domain.

It does help to have search terms in the site address, so for instance

www.spanglefish.com/redleathershoes/

would help you be found in search engines when someone searches for 'red leather shoes'.

Even better would be one of

www.redleathershoes.com
www.red-leather-shoes.com

You can register your own domain to use instead of the original Spanglefish address - see the Domains section of your Site Settings page.

File Names

The second part of your URL is the file name. When you first create a page on your website you'll find the system has given it an address something like

www.spanglefish.com/mywebsite/index.asp?pageid=123456

Clearly, this address doesn't really tell anyone what the page is about. So once you've created your pages go to Site Settings --> Search Engines etc --> Create Unique Page Addresses and change it to something like

www.spanglefish.com/mystuff.asp

Putting these together

If you have your own domain then you have the ability to create perfect URLs for your pages. So for instance you might have the URL

www.red-leather-shoes.com/girls-tap-dancing-shoes.asp

If your page really is about red leather girls tap dancing shoes, and you've tailored your text, page title and meta tags, then you've given yourself a really good chance of being found on Google next time someone searches for 'red tap dancing shoes for girls'.