It is believed that search engines tend to read from top to bottom and from left to right. Text contents are the ones being read by the bots that is why it is important to consider on-page optimization on your seo efforts. Restructuring title tags and meta tags, stressing and having the right amount of keywords and permalink structures are some of the important things an seo specialist whould consider in order to have better results at the serps.
Permalinks are very important when it comes to seo. I have posted few months back about permalink structures on my experimental weblog. Most seo’s are aware of this factor and do not overlook this matter.
In permalinks we have:
UGLY (usually the default):
http://example.com/?p=N
Almost-Pretty (path info):
http://example.com/index.php/yyyy/mm/dd/post-name/
Pretty Permalinks ( mod rewrite):
http://example.com/category/post-name/
or http://example.com/post-name
What i want to point out is that, if you want google to notice your keywords, we could start by NOT pushing your keywords away by placing any other items on the url. Having a /date/post-name or /category/post-name on your url actually pushes your domain away (remember that google bot reads from left to right). This may have a little effect on seo, but sometimes, small details can also be helpful.
Now, you have your blog with a permalink structure of /category/post-name or /date/post-name and would want to change it to http://domain.com/post-name but hesitant to do so because you have keywords on the serps and afraid that you might lose your traffic. I have searched and found a plugin that actually writes codes on your .htaccess that would redirect your old posts to new posts, even those who are indexed and have rankings on the serp.
Permalink Migration Plugin for Wordpress
I’m not a coder and such redirection is important for some of my blogs, I was also then worried about some of my indexed keywords, that is why i searched and downloaded a plugin for wordpress which you can download at http://www.deanlee.cn/wordpress/permalinks-migration-plugin.
I hope this helps.
ps. You can see my blog: Hinlalato.com has the simplest permalink structure and hoping that i woul rank for my keywords of this blog.
September 26th, 2008 at 10:03 am
I am also using the same permalink structure of yours and I can see good feedback from search engines.
September 26th, 2008 at 6:23 pm
I’m using Pretty Permalinks. By the way, which one is the best
1. hxxp://example.com/category/post-name/
or
2. hxxp://example.com/post-name ?
I’m currently using the first.
September 27th, 2008 at 2:32 am
it depends armand, the theory why i used “/post-name” immediately after my domain name is for not to push my keywords away from the domain name. Though, using “/category” would further sort your topics, IMHO, it would somehow push your keywords farther that the search engine must dig one more level deeper to access your keywords.
I had a dilemma in using“/category/post-name and /post-name” before but then again, used “/post-name” instead.
September 30th, 2008 at 4:53 am
I’m using the ” /category/post-name ” structure. What I feel is that categories are my main keywords.. so they need to be in the post. I would concentrate on 10-15 keywords rather than thousands.. So choosing the categories along with domain is better to my knowledge..
September 30th, 2008 at 8:14 am
thanks for the tip. i have to agree with you on that however,
IMHO, category titles are highly targeted keywords and also has a very high competition, even if you would do seo on those, is it not hard to compete with other 45 million sites on that category title?
using long tail keywords next to your domain would (domain.com/post-name) prolly put you on a higher rank on the serp thus traffic would come in, while sharing the same concept that of a category title…
September 30th, 2008 at 11:48 am
Yeah i can do that for you..(Reg.. the SEO consultation)
October 14th, 2008 at 5:36 pm
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October 29th, 2008 at 6:03 pm
Permalink Structures for SEO | Hinlalato…
a very good tip on all who is optimizing keywords for Google Adsense. This is a great help to all of us who are at unfamiliar ground….