The file of my Home page is named index.html, as per convention. But it seems to me that if I renamed the file using relevant keywords it would help my SEO.
I’ve searched online and the archives on this site but haven’t been able to determine one way or the other whether this is a good idea. As I understand it, servers want to see an index page so as to know the default page to which traffic should be directed. Do I understand this correctly? Is there anything else I should know? I’m sure there must be subtleties to this.
Assuming the servers MUST have an index page, what are the workarounds?
Along the same line, I’m also thinking of changing my links to the “Home” page (making it the “Keywords” page on the navigation menu, for example). I don’t think this would be at all problematic.
Yes, your home page must be called “index”. Don’t link to that name, though, but just to the domain name, such as mysite.com, rather than mysite.com/index.html. Your domain will presumably have keywords etc.
I would suggest you are overthinking SEO. Make sure that your links are meaningful and clear, for the people who will use your site, rather than building it for search engines that may or may not (probably not) care about all this fine tuning.
There ar eplanty of places to put keywords, such as in the page title, heading etc. If you are determined to put keywords into your home page name, you could redirect the index page to another page, but to me that ooks a bit ugly anyway.
You can actually use whatever name you like for the home page provided that you inclide that name in the list of names to check for where a file name isn’t specified - if the server is running Apache you can do it either in the config file within Apache itself or in the .htaccess file. Since the ifdea is to be able to omit the file name the file name will have no impact on SEO though regardess of what you use as the home page.
You mean that rather than my navigation menu (for example) linking to drumdr.com/index.com, I could have it link to drumdr.com?
I was thinking that rather than having my hypertext be “Home”, it could be “Hand Drum Repair”. I know I’m looking at a minor points, but I figure it all adds up. There’s no single thing that’s going to get me to the top of the SERPs.
I’m trying to learn, and I’ve found it useful to see where my ideas take me.
I’m no expert either, but I think felgall is saying two things here:
you can choose to have something other than “index” as the name of the default home page. There are various ways to set this up, the easiest being via a .htaccess file.
In case of better SEO you sholud link to domain.com instead of domain.com/index.html
with the main-keyword as anchor, ex: <a href=“./” title=“Main-Keyword”>Main-Keyword</a>
It’s all still vague to me. I’m going to have to do some serious research and see if I can get a handle on it. If anyone can suggest a good reference source for the topic, I would appreciate it.