When planning the redesign of my website I included primary keywords and phrases in my file names.

These were words and phrases that were also relevant to – and repeated within – each page’s content, title and description.

Doing so appeared to pull my site higher in Google almost immediately. Within a week or so I’d popped up on page two.

A few weeks later, to maximise my file names’ effectiveness, I separated the words within each with an underscore. I’d heard that this helps search engines recognise each word as distinct. eg copywriting_brighton.html rather than copywritingbrighton.html or copywriting-brighton.html.

Putting underscores into my url file names appeared to give my site another boost, bringing it onto Page one of Google the following week for a couple more of my key search terms.

I know this isn’t rocket science. But it’s a relatively simple aspect of SEO that’s often overlooked. If you name your files sensibly it won’t rocket your site to the top of Page 1 of Google the next day from a standing start, but it could make a real difference.

TIP: Don’t forget to write 301 redirects for the pages you rename!