vital marketing

I was updating a client’s web site this morning and they asked me to name a pdf file: “Poster – Regional Disparities and Economic Outcomes Associated with Minimally Invasive and Conventional Surgeries of the Chest, Abdomen, and Pelvis.”

Here are a few best practices to keep in mind when you are naming files:
No spaces: use hypens or underscores to separate words. Why? Because some web browsers may not recognize the spaces. If you use spaces, they are frequently translated as “%20”. So if your file name is Hopkins Marketing.pdf, it would be read as Hopkins%20Marketing.pdf. The problem is that this can cause confusion in identifying the actual file name. Spaces in file names can also cause broken links, because popular software (like Microsoft Office) recognize spaces as an opportunity to move to another line. The spaces can also affect your search engine results. So drop the spaces.
Avoid special characters in a file name (eg %, #, $)
Be relevant to the content. The title is important for search engine optimization so get your key words in there.
Be brief: Err on the side of brevity. Depending on the application, you may be limited to 256 characters or fewer.
Generally about 25 character maxium is a sufficient length/goal.

With that last comment, I’m off to reduce this 148 character file name by 80%. I’ll start by removing the spaces!