Keyword rich page names

Now this is a subject that can be a little bit contentious among the webmaster community as there are various opinions as to whether there is any SEO benefit to using keyword rich pagenames or ones which at least describe the target page.

For example a url might be:
www.mysite.com/index.php?product_id=25
or it could be
www.mysite.com/8mm-widget.html (for example)

(we aren’t going to get into url rewrites here this is just by way of example)

the pages could equally be:

www.mysite.com/page1.html
and
www.mysite.com/web-design-services.html

I’m not stating for a minute that the search engines take any account of the words in the page name as part of their ranking allgorithms let me make that clear.

The reasons that I suggest the use of keyword rich pagenames is that they are easy for people to read (most search engines show the target url at the bottom of the website listing) and can reinforce the search keywords/phrases as they are shown on page and also highlighted (at the time of writing Google certainly does this).

The SEO reason for using keyword rich page names is that very often when people create links to other pages (i.e people linking to pages on your website) they use the pagename as the anchor text – i.e the link shows as:

www.mysite.com/web-design-services.html

therefore your target keywords end up in an external link to you which can all help build up the relevance of your page for those target keywords.