Comments on: Boost Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) using Permalinks

By: free traffic blaster.

free traffic blaster. — Mon, 27 Mar 2006 10:15:39 +0000

free traffic blaster available here….

By: aggressive skater

aggressive skater — Sun, 12 Mar 2006 22:53:53 +0000

Great tips here. I made the changes to my blog on friday and today (two days later), I am number one on google for aggressive skate blog! These are great tips, they really work.

By: Jason Kong

Jason Kong — Sun, 12 Mar 2006 08:32:33 +0000

Tom,

I thought I could get around the /%postname%/ issue by using /%postname%/%post_id%/ instead. Sure, I have to add a fairly meaningless post id at the end, but the postname is earlier in the url. But when I tried that it didn’t really work — I got a “Error 404 - Not Found” error. What happened?

By: Paladin

Paladin — Thu, 09 Mar 2006 20:11:18 +0000

Love this thread!

I’ve learned a lot but I don’t know why (some) images aren’t being found on a single post page. Any ideas?

http://www.21stcenturypaladin.com/

Cheers!
-Paladin

By: » SEO, WordPress and You | 21st Century Paladin

» SEO, WordPress and You | 21st Century Paladin — Thu, 09 Mar 2006 20:08:42 +0000

[...] Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an ever changing landscape where sites to to find favor with the High King of the realm—Google. So after a bit of searching, I found a well-traveled discussion over on Tom Raftery’s site. Interesting and informative but I did have that dreaded .htaccess problem. [...]

By: Tom Raftery

Tom Raftery — Wed, 01 Mar 2006 21:18:39 +0000

whtan

it is possible - in fact it is what I have done on this site! However, they way I have done it required a horrible hack which means now that I have two Technorati profiles splitting my ranking between tomrafteryit.net and tomrafteryit.net/views!

Thanks Rob.

By: Rob Miller

Rob Miller — Sat, 25 Feb 2006 03:25:02 +0000

Thanks for the great tutorial.

By: whtan

whtan — Fri, 24 Feb 2006 19:05:18 +0000

Hello Tom, thanks for the advice. I’m just setting my blog up today, and I find the whole process quite fascinating. I was wondering if it’s possible to do this:

I want to have my blog at http://domain.com/blog/, but at the same time have short permalinks like http://domainname.com/this-link/.

Is that possible?
WH

By: Archie

Archie — Fri, 24 Feb 2006 17:04:08 +0000

I couldnt agree more!

By: Bob

Bob — Wed, 15 Feb 2006 03:33:13 +0000

While I can’t say I agree 100% I pretty much like how you say it.

By: We Buy Houses in RI

We Buy Houses in RI — Sat, 28 Jan 2006 20:08:36 +0000

Tom, I also think people need to be conscious of how long their permalink URLs are.

If they are too long (78 characters is a traditional limit for each line), many e-mail programs will split them across lines, breaking the link.

I noticed this, in fact, when I was going to send the URL for this page to someone - at 82 characters it just wrapped.

Maybe the trade-off for having more keywords in the permalink for Google to notice is worth it, but at least one Internet “expert” (Jakob Nielson - URLs as UI) has written about how very long URLs sabotage the second-best way people find your site (recommendations from friends).

I was going to quote from that article, but there are so many good points it’s worth a quick read of the whole thing.

Actually, in light of a more recent article by Nielsen (Search Engines - Leeches on the Web), the value of that secondary channel (recommendations) seems even more important.

(And yes, I’m aware of services such as TinyURL which people can use to take a long URL and turn it into a short one - but the vast majority of people will never go to that extra effort. They will simply copy the address from their browser bar, paste into e-mail, and send - and the e-mail program will break up the URL silently in the process.)

By: thevinemultimedia

thevinemultimedia — Sat, 21 Jan 2006 09:16:19 +0000

I just started moving over from blogger, putting my blog on my own url. I have the permalinks on and they work fine for posts that have a category assigned to them, but for the posts that are uncategorized, the link is simply ///.
I am familiar with how .htaccess & php handle this, but not with the specific WP code. I would think that at least they would come up //post-name/
Any thoughts?
Joseph

By: Alison

Alison — Wed, 11 Jan 2006 23:16:13 +0000

Tom
Thanks for the quick reply - and the welcome to WP.
All my posts have categories - that’s why I am baffled that they come up ‘uncategorised’. If I click on a category from the side bar, I get a page of links to posts under that category, and the URI lists that category, but when I click on the link to the post and the post comes up, the category vanishes and the URI is –/uncategorised/followed-by-the-post-name.html
A

By: Tom Raftery

Tom Raftery — Wed, 11 Jan 2006 22:44:20 +0000

Alison,

you need to create categories for your posts.

In WordPress 1.5 it is Manage -> Categories -> Add new

In WordPress 2.0 In the Write Post screen, click on the + beside Category on the right hand side and add categories here.

Hope this helps - welcome to WordPress.

By: alisonboston.com Welcome » Pretty Permalinks

alisonboston.com Welcome » Pretty Permalinks — Wed, 11 Jan 2006 22:06:27 +0000

[...] I’ve just switched the site over to Permalinks to start the process of maximising my presence in search engines. I’ve scratched my head over using these since I started this website and every time I started to read the ‘instructions’ at the Word Press Codex site I’d get blurry eyed and my third eye would ache, and I would say: “Not yet…” I think the fact that WordPress lists it under ‘advanced’ use may have predisposed me to thinking it was confusing because tonight I clicked through the various links and found myself on Tom Raftery’s site reading a thread on search engine optimisation using permalinks and it suddenly all clicked. [...]

By: Alison

Alison — Wed, 11 Jan 2006 21:49:47 +0000

This is great information here, thanks very much!
I’ve just switched my site over to Permalinks - after operating for 4 months with the other system. I want you to know I read the Word Press info on Permalinks, and was mystified - and spent ages looking at my C-panel files making sure my .htaccess was in the right place (I am green newbie) and then I came here and read this thread and suddenly it all flashed before me clear as daylight. So…

I am using %my_site%/%category%/%postname%.html and the category is coming up on my static page URI, but my posts are all coming up as ‘uncategorised’. Do you know how I can fix that?

Alison

By: eduardo

eduardo — Wed, 28 Dec 2005 00:35:52 +0000

Oh, alright!
Thank you Tom, for your kind help and clarification of the matter.

By: Tom Raftery

Tom Raftery — Mon, 26 Dec 2005 09:44:54 +0000

Not quite Eduardo!

If you use /?p=10 you get no advantage. If you use PermaLinks you get good search engine optimisation and you get PR if someone links to your post.

By: eduardo

eduardo — Mon, 26 Dec 2005 02:03:32 +0000

Ok, i see. I am mixing search engine results with PageRank.
So if i use /?p=10 i will have the PageRank transfered to my posts, but i will appear better in search engine results if i use permalinks with /%postname%/ - is this what you are telling me?

By: Tom Raftery

Tom Raftery — Fri, 23 Dec 2005 16:44:25 +0000

You have most of it correct Eduardo - let me try to clarify it further.

All posts have a permalink, a unique address. If you don’t configure your PermaLinks, the PermaLink will look like your mydomain/?p=10 example - this doesn’t give you any search engine benefits.

If you configure your PermaLinks to be /%year%/%postname%/, then your post will contain the title of your post and if people search for words contained in your post title, you have a greater chance of being found.

The Google PR issue is separate.

Hope this is clearer