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How To Increase Your Blog’s Search Ranking in 5 Minutes

July 16th, 2007 · 14 Comments

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Cold Hard Fact #4: Search engines are hot for content that’s closest to the root of your domain name.

Your Big “Uh-Oh”: If you’re using the default Wordpress structure, SEO love is not coming your way.

How To Fix This Profit-Sucking Problem

If you’re using a blog to build your business, you want to take advantage of SEO as much as you can. And while books can (and are) written on the ins and outs of SEO, there’s one simple thing you can do in the next 5 minutes to make a significant difference in your search engine rankings: Make your blog post permalinks (URLs) SEO-friendly.

And I don’t mean “Hi, nice to meet you” friendly - I’m talking “Get a room” friendly. And you want to get real friendly with the search engines.

If you do not do this, you are hurting your rankings. Period. And lower rankings = lower traffic = lower sales. So let’s get to it.

Note: If you have a new blog, do these steps in order. If you have an existing blog, read this entire post before you do anything, or you’ll end up breaking all those incoming links you know and love.

Here’s what you need to do to set up the most SEO-friendly blog post URLs:

  1. Log into your Wordpress admin panel and click “Options” (all the way on the right)
  2. Click on the “Permalinks”
  3. Scroll down, click the “Custom, please specify” radio button
  4. In the “Custom Structure” field below it, type this: /%postname%/
  5. Click the “Update Permalink Structure” button.

And that’s it. Here’s why it works: Search engines give “weight” to URLs that are closer to the top of the domain name. In other words:

  • www.betterfasternow.com/why-my-product-rocks ranks better than
  • www.betterfasternow.com/2007/06/05/why-my-product-rocks

And that’s all there is to it. And that only took one minute. The other 4 minutes are for the people who have existing blogs. They will need to use Dean Lee’s fraktastic permalink redirection plugin to keep things SEO-happy when the search engines try to go to your old school permalinks and find they’ve packed up and moved on. Takes no time at al, and the instructions are all found on the link above.

And that’s all there is to it. So if you ain’t doing this - you need to jump outta your seat and get on it. A higher pagerank is waiting.

(Are you going to use this? Give a shout out in the comments below and point us to your re-direct-alicious blog!)

Tags: Better Search Engine Rankng

14 responses so far ↓

  • 1 Steve M // Jul 17, 2007 at 7:42 pm

    Marvellous. I have two questions. My blog is currently getting a load of hits from buzzfeed.com on the ‘donkey diapers’ story (don’t ask).

    If I use your SE-friendly Permalink system I’d have to use Dean’s plugin as well. Does that work for ordinary links and sites like buzzfeed or just for the search engines?

    I’m not doing too badly on Google (for a newish site). Are you sure your Permalink structure is better?

    Thanks

  • 2 Dave Navarro // Jul 17, 2007 at 8:38 pm

    Steve -

    I did this a while back on the advice of a high-traffic blog and I’ve seen nothing but positive comments about it regarding Google rank.

    I’ll peek around and see if it works better for other search engines & respond when I hear something.

    Thanks for your comment! May I ask how you found this (newish!) blog?

    - Dave

  • 3 Steve M // Jul 17, 2007 at 8:55 pm

    Hi Dave

    I was browsing the WordPress support forum for information on Permalink changing and I found a link to your site.

    Another question: What would I put into the ‘Custom Structure’ field if I want my Permalinks to look like “www.betterfasternow.com/why-my-product-rocks/2007/06/05″ and do you think there would be any point to it?

    Best regards
    Steve

    PS: Very tidy site, well done.

  • 4 Steve M // Jul 17, 2007 at 9:31 pm

    Incidentally, the WordPress Codex states the following:

    “Using only %postname%

    If you use postname as the only element in your permalinks to create a structure such as myblog.com/post-title, the rewrite rules may make it impossible to access pages such as your stylesheet (which has a similar format) or the /wp-admin/ folder. It’s best to include some numeric data (e.g. the post ID or date) in the permalink to prevent this from happening. Additionally, WordPress v1.2.x requires the use of a date structure in order for some features, such as the calendar, to function properly. /%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/ is always a good start.”

    Maybe a date or post number should be included. What do you think?

  • 5 Steve M // Jul 17, 2007 at 9:35 pm

    I quite fancy:

    /%postname%/%year%/

  • 6 Dave Navarro // Jul 18, 2007 at 9:41 am

    Steve -

    All good comments. I don’t have answers for them all, but will look into them.

    Again, the whole purpose of using only %postname% is to keep the post closest to the top level, because Google views that kind of content as more relevant as pages that are down one or more directories.

    That said, I don’t know that /%postname%/%year%/ would be more relevant than /%year%/%postname%/.

    I personally don’t use the calendar feature so that’s moot (I don’t know many who do, since the sidebar real estate could be put to much more valuable use - people tend to be more interested in article titles, not post dates on a calendar grid).

    I’ll keep asking around regarding your other questions. You might also want to try a search on “Permalinks Migration Plugin” and ask your question on blogs that talk about this subject as well.

  • 7 Steve M // Jul 18, 2007 at 1:31 pm

    Actually, there’s another good reason for me not to just use %postname% and that is that I sometimes use the same post name for different posts. For example, I use “…a word from the Norm” sometimes when commenting on a normblog post or “…happening at Harry’s” when discussing what’s going on at Harry’s Place blog.

    So, I’ve decided to go with the /%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/ format, even though I agree with you that the calendar is a waste of space.

    I hope that Google will forgive me.

    Thanks for the discussion and inspiration. I’m so glad that I didn’t rush into anything (for a change). Best of luck with your blog. I’m sure that you will do well.

    Steve

  • 8 Dave Navarro // Jul 18, 2007 at 1:36 pm

    Steve -

    Thanks for the comments - feel free to take a moment to check out the other posts on the blog as well, and comment if you have any questions.

    PS - I believe that with Wordpress, if you have multiple posts with the same name it just appends a number,such as

    /Harry-place
    /Harry-place-1
    /Harry-place-2

    So that there’s no confusion.

  • 9 Steve M // Jul 22, 2007 at 7:11 am

    Hi Dave

    I think that you’re right so I decided to go with your suggestion of /%postname%/

    Disaster.

    Luckily, I tried locally (I use xampp) before attempting to change online.

    I downloaded and activated Dean’s Permalink Migration plugin.

    I then changed my Permalinks to /%postname%/.

    I then set the old Permalink structure in Options/PermalinkMigration to /%post_id%.

    The Permalinks change works in that when I mouse-over the permalink it shows gives the correct new page name. However, when I click it I get “page not found”. I can’t access the ‘new’ page.

    Do you know what I mean and can you help?

    Thanks
    Steve

  • 10 Steve M // Jul 22, 2007 at 7:14 am

    Do I have to do something in .htaccess? Any idea what?

  • 11 Dave Navarro // Jul 23, 2007 at 10:12 am

    Steve -

    You may have run into a bit of lag - when you change the permalink structure (whether using the plugin or not), it takes a short while before the database updates everything.

    I remember on my first blog I made a simple permalink change, and thought I hosed EVERYTHING because no links would work anymore. 10 minutes later, the new links worked.

    My hope is that this is exactly what happened to you … let me know.

  • 12 Steve M // Jul 23, 2007 at 10:55 am

    OK, problem solved. After much keffuffling around with hidden .htaccess files, I finally managed to FTP a blank file up there, modify it and, goodness knows how, my permalinks have now been changed to %name%, as planned. I can also access the pages via the old names, thanks to Dean’s plugin.

    Google, come and get me!

    Best regards
    Steve

    PS: Still couldn’t make the permalink changes in my local file but I don’t suppose that really matters.

  • 13 Erik Karey // Aug 1, 2007 at 6:04 pm

    Very good idea. I started with the dates in the URL and just recently switched to just the post slug using the plugin you’ve listed here.

    I however prefer /%postname%.html as my permalink.

  • 14 Dave Navarro // Aug 1, 2007 at 9:10 pm

    Erik -

    Thanks, wish I could take the credit, but there are tons of posts out there that sing the SEO praises of this strategy.

    I just checked out your blog & would love to touch base with you to talk about RSS strategies. I’m working with a guy who’s pulled in 100 RSS readers in his first week and has a month goal of 1000.

    Shoot me an email at dave at davenavarro dot com.

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