Newest SEO advice

[doug selby]

It seems to me that it would be best to convert all the underscores to hyphens in one go, and then use php in a custom 404 to filter your URIs, perhaps:

$pagename = $REQUEST_URI;
$pagename = ereg_replace("_", "-", $pagename); 

with the appropriate redirect headers.
I'm sure it must be possible in .htaccess too - anyone care to make a stab at it?

[RuralWeb]

I dont think that - or _ makes that much difference to results on google, I do however see problems with changing - to _ ie producing lots of pages with similar names unless the server is cleaned. Also pages will be held in the index for many months causing errors. Just a thought!

[wjcampbe]

I'm with Malcolm on this - like all SEO work, a little bit at a time is best.

Decide the phrase the page will target, change the description wording to target that phrase, adjust the page name, make the htaccess redirect, publish the page. Wait for it to propagate - watch your web stats. Move to the next page.

There is advantage to having a mixture of fully optimised, partially optimised and non-optimised pages on a site, and even more so to constantly changing content.

[doug selby]

OK, I'm convinced.
In fact, I have quite a good turnover of products and a single product per page, so I guess I'll just change my brouchure pages, and then optimise new pages as I create them.
Thanks for the advice, guys.