What Permalink Structure Should I Be Using?

In my last post, I spoke about the importance of permalink structures, but it seems the one I recommended isn’t without it’s issues.

I told you that I personally use the custom permalink structure  /%postname%/  which hasn’t seemed to be an issue until now…  but yesterday, I started getting all kinds of errors with my feeds and when I tried to check for feed validation, I get another error saying that my feed isn’t valid.

After some digging around, I found a discussion on the Semiologic Forum and Denis de Bernardy, the developer of Semiologic, states that using the custom permalinks structure  /%postname% will make make WordPress think that yoursite.com/feed is the post titled /feed.  In other words, it makes WP confuse your posts, pages, and feed urls.

So, having shyed away from using the default date/name based structure, it seems that this is the one Denis and many others recommend because it’s just as good for SEO, and it’s much better for usability.

This is what yours would look like, using the date/name based structure:

http://www.yourdomainname.com/2007/06/12/sample-post/

  

 

You new here? If so, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Why Create A Business Blog With WordPress?

Why should you use WordPress to create your business blog anyway?

Now, I’m sure you’ve read somewhere on the Internet or heard someone say that you can set up a WordPress blog and start blogging in 15-minutes or less and, that would be true.  But, that only gives you half a picture since this will only give you the default WordPress blog, which is fine but you must bear in mind that NOT all WordPress blogs are created equal!  More on this later.

But first of all… what is a blog and why should you have one?

A blog derives its name from web log, which can be updated instantly, easily and usually frequently.  A blog is like an online journal, although it’s a lot more than this.  The activity of updating a blog is “blogging” and someone who keeps a blog is a “blogger.”

Why should you have a blog if you’re a small business ower, author, information marketer or indpendent professional?  You can…

• Sack your web designer for a start!
• Build your reputation quickly and easily
• Get more traffic to your existing websites via your blog if you have them
• Gain total control over updating your website 
• Build relationships with your prospects and customers

Furthermore, by taking advantage of the power of blogging, you can reach a passionate audience hungry to be informed and entertained through your creative writing.

What you will need to set up your first WordPress blog…

1. a domain name (godaddy.com)
2. a web hosting account (LunarPages.com)
3. FREE WordPress software (www.wordpress.org)

And how do you set up a WordPress Blog? 

You can either ask your webmaster to do it if you have no idea, or if your website host using cpanel, then you will find a blue smiley face icon on there.  Click on this and it will give you the option of doing a "one click install" of WordPress and you’ll be ready to go in minutes.  Be sure NOT to create your blog in a directory that already contains files since you’ll delete everything.

So, going back to my statement that "all blogs are not created equal," what did I mean?

When you create a blog, there are still search engine optimization considerations to be made and merely putting up a blog isn’t going to entice the search engine spiders to crawl your site. 

The permalink structure that you use will also have a profound effect on the search engines finding you.  If your permalink structure has characters such as question marks and numbers in them, you’re going to be at a disadvantage.  The default WordPress theme uses this style permalink and you should at least change it to the date and post name option, which is much better.

» http://www.trishjones.com/2007/06/12/sample-post/

I personally use a custom permalink - /%postname%/    

I could go on and on about the drawbacks of using the default WordPress theme, but needless to say, unless you’re savvy at SEO, just stick to a WordPress theme that is already search engine optimized.  A few options are:

• Semiologic
• n design studio
• problogger.net

The one thing you shouldn’t do if you’re considering setting up a blog and it’s this …

Don’t Leave It Another Day!

Too many people I come across are waiting for the perfect opportunity, blog layout, theme or whatever.  The hardest part is just getting started and once you do, you’ll find it’s easeir than you think.  If you still can’t get your head around it, pay someone else to do it for you, but don’t let "can’t do it" be an option.

I personally have a blog development service and your webmaster should at least be able to set up a basic wordpress blog for you.

Best,

  

Is The Google LSI Myth or Fact?

It’s crawling the web and it’s the LSI explosion.

After making my last post, I received this email from Michael Duz about Google Latent Semantec Indexing (LSI), and I think it’s worth reading and worth taking a look at, but I stress, there are many, many other and easier ways to get traffic to your blog, so I wouldn’t focus on LSI (whether you believe it to be fact or myth) as a strategy for getting "brownie points" with the Google.

I’m posting this comment because I made reference to it in my previous post and, because I want to discourage you from focusing on it. 

Enjoy!  

*******************************************************************************************************************

Your recent post ‘Write Better Blog Posts’ came onto my horizon and I have a couple of suggestions for you, hope you don’t mind?

You say "Google now uses something called Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) to match phrases on a page…." which I am afraid to say is completely untrue.

However it is unfortunately a prevalent myth. LSI is a complex mathematical concept little understood outside of the Information Retrieval academic milieu. I humbly suggest you read a couple of recent posts of mine on this topic which I wrote in an attempt to get  the myth, that search engines use LSI, buried once and for all.

What is Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI)?
http://www.seo-blog.com/latent-semantic-indexing-lsi-explained.php
The LSI Myth http://www.seo-blog.com/latent-semantic-index-lsi-myth.php

It is however likely that Google (alone) is using ‘Phrase Based Generation of Document Descriptions’ but that also is a complex topic and little understood by the lay person.

The best advice is to write content naturally and forget about writing for the search engines. I have in the past posted a synopsis of best practise in this area which you may also find interesting
http://www.seo-blog.com/text.php

Thank you for your time and if you feel like joining the ranks of Dr Garcia http://www.miislita.com/information-retrieval-tutorial/svd-lsi-tutorial-5-lsi-keyword-research-co-occurrence.html
and other mathematicians in debunking the myth you will be most welcome!