• What the heck are permalinks
• Why would I care about optimizing them?
• Will I have to undergo expensive surgeries in order to optimize?

What’s SEO?

Search Engine Optimization is the science, or art (in many cases) of tweaking things in your favor with the search engines.  No one can “guarantee” top rankings on search engines, because the method by which Search Engines work is not completely known and changes constantly.  In fact, Google even employs real people to validate search engine results – they dig through popular search terms to make sure that people aren’t accidentally getting “bad things” to the tops of the ranks and ruin their good name.

Which brings us to the …

Two Types of SEO

Off-Page SEO

Off Page SEO is when you do things to build in-bound links through any of a variety of methods.  Things like link-directories, link-swapping, and article marketing are all effective ways of building inbound links, thus off-page SEO .

On-Page (or On-Site) SEO

On-page SEO is the type of optimization you can perform on your page of which you are in complete control.  This type of SEO pertains to things like using good keywords in the body and title your pages, having sufficient keyword density and linking to other pages within your site using frequently sought keywords, and the like.

Google takes a look at many on-page factors when determining what makes a page relevant for a certain search term.  One of those factors is the URL of the page itself.  If the URL of the page contains the words that people are searching for, Google lends just a smidge (since there are so many factors) more weight to the likelihood that your page will be found as relevant for the sought keyword.

Here’s an example:

http://Using-Twitter.com/blog/How-To-Retweet

Now, when people are searching for things like “Twitter How To Retweet ” or “Using Twitter Retweet ” or similar phrases, that page will be considered more relevant for those terms because those words (and sometimes complete phrases) are matched perfectly in the URL.

Knowing what you know now… how does a URL like THIS compare?

http://Using-Twitter.com/blog/?p=7

Exactly. ICK!   Which brings us to…

What’s a Permalink?

“Permalink” is an abbreviated form of the phrase “Permanent Link.”  In WordPress, it’s simply the URL someone would use in order to directly link to a specific page in your site.  It’s also the URL that Google will (or won’t) send people to when they search for your targeted keywords.

How do I optimize Permalinks?

WordPress is very configurable, and as such, there’s an easy way to set your URLs to be far more meaningful to the search engines.

1. Open the URL “<YourBlogUrl>/wp-admin/options-permalink.php”So, for the site mentioned above, the link would be

   http://Using-Twitter.com/blog/wp-admin/options-permalink.php

2. In the “Common Settings” section, select the radio button marked “Custom Structure”.
3. In the big text box over to the right of “Custom Structure”, enter this value: “/%postname%/” (without the quotes)
4. Click the “Save Changes” button at the very bottom to put those new setting in to effect.
5. MOST IMPORTANT: Visit your home page and click a few URLs to make sure the new ones look like you expect.  If not, repeat the steps above more closely.

PLEASE NOTE: If you’re using a crappy hosting provider (such as GoDaddy), you will have to wait about 10-15 minutes for your changes to take effect.  Make sure to make these changes during slow traffic periods or after hours.  Better yet, switch your hosting company to one that doesn’t suck .

No related posts.

In catching up with the world, a technology I had largely ignored showed me it has really grown up.  This little tool is called Twitter.

Success is bred from Solid Marketing Tactics

As you probably know, I’m not one to head for the latest gold rush, falling for the “do this xyz new fad before everyone else is already doing it” thing. Why pay $900 for a product or a report, when it will be available in 3, 6, or 9 months for a fraction of the price, only to have Google catch on to the new ploy and wipe it out.

I constantly preach how we, as marketers, need to be aware of how the tools of the trade are used against us as well as how to show restraint when using powerful strategies such as social acceptance and scarcity, and thus avoid buying every little product tossed my way.

Given this tendency of mine, I’m kind of a “late adopter” of most technologies, despite my technology background.

There are just so many new technologies being introduced that it makes no sense to rush into every latest thing. I didn’t buy Betamax during the video tape wars. Good thing, because VHS kicked its butt. I didn’t rush to buy an HD-DVD player the moment it came out – and look how I’ve been rewarded, Blu-Ray is taking over through strategic relationships. Both of these products have won, not because they’re better products, but because of classic marketing paradigms. Strong distribution and mass-adoption finally pushed each product over the tipping point.

Here’s another brick and mortar product metaphor to consider. Buying a fax machine, in itself, is meaningless. It is not helpful for most people to own a machine that picks up the phone and screeches into it. The value of a fax machine is not the machine itself, but rather the network you’re gaining access to. With a fax machine, you can send an image of a physical document to anyone in the world (who has a fax machine). Nearly every business and a lot of individuals have fax machines nowadays. Being an early adopter into the fax world gets you very little reach while the hardware cost was 10x as much as today. But, now it makes a lot of sense for a lot of businesses.

Similar to the fax machine, Amazon’s success model is how it connects hoards of buyers with hoards of sellers. If you want to buy or sell a product, you’ve got it made. Amazon’s price for connecting you to tons of people is trivial and the network of buyers and sellers is the reason to put an item on auction or consider buying from an eBay auction.

Sure, they were the first big online auction house. But that wasn’t the reason for their success.  HotBot and AltaVista were first big entrants into the search game, but Google still whomped them by providing a better product and making sure the world knew it. So, while being “first to market” sure helps, without the rest of the marketing vehicle in place, being first to market simply isn’t enough to guarantee victory.

So, what makes Twitter special?

Twitter might have been first, but that’s not the point. Twitter is nearing the breaking point of popularity. Barack Obama twittered his Presidential campaign progress. It’s gaining the same kind of household acceptance that Google and Amazon have attained. The competition from “Pownce” and “Zipline” has all but evaporated. Heard of them? I hadn’t heard of them until I had researched this article.  Twitter is absolutely nearing the tipping point, if it isn’t already.

So, what is Twitter?

Twitter is a “microblogging” tool for indicating short, sweet “tweets” of what’s going on in your world. These tweets are limited to the size of an SMS message, because it targets mobile phone users… and that’s a huge community. Through twitter, you can reach your audience in real time. You can show your mastery of your subject matter, broadcast items of importance, build suspense, and truly connect to your market.  Common practices for this connection process are the sharing of recent ideas, key news, links to articles you’ve recently published, and pictures of the family doing family stuff and otherwise “being human” to your readers.

With twitter people ‘follow’ the tweets of others. Those who are interested in your world can follow you, when they’re not, they can leave. So, to be followed, you should probably be some sort of interesting. For example, you can follow me on Twitter at http://Twitter.com/DaivRawks , if you were so inclined. But, as Zig Ziglar, master sales mentor says, “No one cares how much you know, until they know how much you care.” This is where the relationships come in.

By creating relationships, one at a time, you create your network – your viral communication medium of the 21^st century.  When people like the message you’ve delivered or are excited by the news they “retweet” your message to their own respective networks.  And they tell 70 friends, and so on.

I hope I’ve convinced you to give twitter a try. And when you look me up on twitter, you might just find me interesting enough to follow. And if you ask me a question, I’ll probably answer – that’s how this whole thing works.

I’ll continue this series with more specific insights on how to maximize your leverage on Twitter. See you there.

P.S. Remember, you can follow me on Twitter at http://www.Twitter.com/DaivRawks

No related posts.

After years of running an article site using ASP that I wrote from scratch (my development language of choice as the time – as there weren’t many on the market at the time), I decided to start running with one that had more of the features I was looking for already built in, rather than having to develop them all from scratch.

I’ve started dropping my old Type A habits and picking up some help here and there to get me through some of the stuff that doesn’t require my specific attention.  With all of that said, my Editor brought this article to my attention.  I was flummoxed by how horrible it was.

It was as if someone shoved a perfectly good article into a paper shredder at the same time as a thesaurus.  There is a popular product out there for randomizing your content called Content Spinner, or something like that.  This article looked like Content Spinner got ahold of it.  When I searched for the content on the page, very few actual results came back — so I’m thinking that the bulk of the articles posted in this manner were not accepted or have been deleted.  It would appear that some article marketers believe it’s more important to get links without any effort than it is to actually get links.

I’ve already deleted this flotsam from my Article Directory out of repulsion, so you won’t be able to find it there, but I found it elsewhere.  Read the article for yourself — You absolutely HAVE to read this .

http://www.allbestarticles.com/family/hobbies/extreme-basics-of-indoor-gardening.html

So…

• If you decide to run an article directory — which you may very well, even if it’s simply to drive traffic to your local business site, never ever let an article like this get on your site.  Absolutely everyone will hate you for it.  Children in Bosnia are crying because AllBestArticles.com (sic) posted that tripe.  You don’t want to make the children cry, do you?
• If you decide to give article marketing a shot, and you don’t hire me to handle it for you, absolutely make sure that you never end up with articles that look like the one above.

No related posts.