How’s Your URL Looking?

Aug 092008

How’s Your URL Looking?

Blogging, SEO Add comments

Found this article through Connie Benson Bensen. There are other community strategy links to check out, but I wanted to look at this one in particular.

Do write posts on how to use features of your product.
Do write about what is happening in the industry or reaction to relevant news.
Do provide readers with an inside lane behind your operations.
Do offer RSS or Email updates
Do engage with your readers via comments
Do blog about topics with authority
Do ask a colleague to proof your blog for spelling, grammar, and your possibly offensive jokes
Don’t just copy and paste a press release
Don’t attack your competition
Don’t write about internal promotions or corporate back slapping. “GO TEAM! You Rock! You’re a legend! We’re all f*cking great!” are fine for internal communications but not for general consumption.

Excerpt from “http://aloa.uplink-web.com/?p=55″ article on PR tips for startups. Read the article it’s good. There is one thing I want you to take specific note of. Looking at the url of the blog post shows that they are not using their blog software to it’s full potential. The specific url for the post is ?p=55 which is absolutely just terrible. All that tells search engines is that this is the 55th post on the blog. It contains no information as to what the blog post is about. This can easily be remedied in Wordpress by assigning the “permalinks” to “day and name” or “month and name”.

This option can be found under settings/permalinks and works wonders for your blog.

Had this blog been properly set up the url would have looked something like “http://aloa.uplink-web.com/2008/08/08/10-20-pr-tips-for-startups”
which of course tells search engines that on 08/08/2008 an article was written pertaining in some way to PR or public relations, it’s a tips article, and it’s targeted to startups. Much better than “this is the 55th post written on this blog”.

Note: The 2.0 won’t do much because puctuation doesn’t show up in url’s generated by wordpress.

Make sure you properly set up your permalinks. Every bit of SEO helps.

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Damien Franco

@Connie - I'm sort of laughing to myself that I misspelled your name. I'm usually pretty diligent about double checking those things.

But it does bring up a good point in ensuring that meta data inlude common name misspellings.

Connie Bensen

Hi Damien,
Thanks for linking to my post & I'm glad that you found a useful post. That's a great example for increasing SEO. There are so many simple things.

I think the title & first paragraph are really important to Google now. I've been able to get myself to the #1 entry for my search terms. But I should recheck my metatags too (added in the backside of WP). I was having problems getting traction for Connie Benson (the common misspelling of my name). Then when I realized I didn't have it in the metatags (& added it) - it immediately made a difference!

Keep the ideas coming -they're helpful!
Connie

Damien Franco dot Com