SEO 2.0

Brisbane 1959 - image by pizzodisevo.

Who wants to read yesterday’s news? This might sound like a rhetoric question but it’s not: Google users or searchers want to read old news. They actually seek out your old, even archaic content right now. What do they find? Outdated information and dead links.

I just checked a blog of mine which turns 5 this year and noticed a short post which had 20 visitors from Google this month for being #1 for a specific but still not that seldom used term. It contained 4 external links and 3 of them were dead.

Do you think people who end up on your blog and click your links to find 404 error messages or worse domain grabbers cheap ad infested sites will want to come back?

Well I guess this is really a rhetorical question. So what to do? Clean up months or years of archived posts? No, this is obviously too much work also not really rewarding work.

Instead view it as a positive opportunity to get fresh content without actually writing it anew, just update one old post at a time.

Also you can earn additional credibility doing this as people appreciate well kept websites as valuable resources. Just mark the post as updated with the classic line from static websites in pre-blog times “Update [date]” and also describe what it was exactly that you updated. Many open source projects do it this way with their software. This method works fine and tells the visitors: This project is alive and kicking.

Now with blogging you could argue that the visitor will see that it’s alive looking at the latest posts or visiting the front page, but most people won’t, they will exit your site on the broken page they entered.

In the above mentioned case it took me less than 10 minutes to research the new links, some were on a different page within the same site, one disappeared altogether but I found a very similar one elsewhere within minutes. Then I changed the date in WordPress to the current one and added an

“Published at [date]. Last updated at [date]”

line at the bottom as well as an update notice above stating that the links have been fixed. That post now appears as “new” on my front page.

• So I did not have to write a new one today.
• Also a post from 2005 has most probably been not yet read by the current blog readers.
• Even if they either forgot it or the additional value of new links makes sense for them too.
  

So with a few minutes of work you can both get content and earn credibility for your blog with old news. Do not forget, your archive is your goldmine, when it’s full of rocks and dust readers won’t discover the gold though.

Findability is a seemingly new term that has become a buzzword recently due to a book called Building Findable Websites by Aarron Walter (not to mix up with Aaron Wall, author of SEO Book). Now as a true SEO 2.0 I’m always on the lookout for new concepts and innovation. So I took a little time to find out more about findability, it’s meaning, roots, who coined the term and when.

The first thing I found out was that neither Aaron Walter nor renown usability expert Jakob Nielsen used the term findability first. It appears that the term findability and most notably ambient findability was coined in 2002 by Peter Morville who even published a book of the same title. First things first though, so let me explain what findability is about.

Website findability is the new and better SEO so to say or, on-site SEO without the bad rep of the SEO industry if you adopt the definition from Building Findable Websites.

Basically Aarron Walter says that building websites for findability encompasses not only SEO but a holistic approach with usability and web standards etc. in mind, a position I can fully support. One thing that Mr. Walter attempts to tell us though is:

SEO is bad, findability is good.

This is a good move from a marketing perspective as nobody likes SEO of course, the term is a stain in itself or at least is perceived by the majority as such.

When we go back to what Peter Morville wrote in 2002 we discover that findability and SEO are not contradictory but basically twin brothers. He acknowledges how

SEO contributes to a websites findability along with usability and other important aspects of information architecture.

Now that might be the problem of it not generating enough hype so that Aarron Walter took a more aggressive approach.

Also Walter reduced findability to websites build with web standards while Morville’s definition extends to the real world. Morville uses examples like looking for long term parking or restrooms on an airport which strike home very convincingly. Jakob Nielsen used the term in 2006 for the first time as far as I can see. Nielsen also limited it to website findability without denouncing SEO though.

Now am I angry at Aarron Walter for being explicit about SEO? No, I’m glad, glad someone makes a strong point on renaming the “whole problem”. In this sense I took the wrong approach with attempting to redefine SEO and having to deal with it’s reputation problem. Using another, better term is the by far more effective way of redefining something. Sadly it’s mostly used by political think tanks to manipulate the public usually. In this case the outcome of the manipulation is a positive one. People will acknowledge best practices and put them in use.

I don’t care how do you call it, SEO, findability or like myself probably SEO 2.0 as long as we have the same goals. Our goals match while the methods do just partly as findability refers in web development only to the on-site or on-page factors of SEO which is not enough to be found, especially in the Web 2.0 environment, but they match.

The single most positive aspect of website findability the teaching aspect:

Findability teaches designers, web developers and information architects what they condescendingly ignored for years, making websites findable.

Now as I am the garbage man of all these lazy designers, web developers and information architects and had to fix crap websites for years, I’m sick and tired of it. I want to do the real thing, the content, the SEO 2.0 the fun stuff.

So clean up your websites yourself guys and don’t rely on the poor Mexican migrant worker wit a sombrero to do it.

That said, I still prefer the approach of Peter Norville. So do not only read Aaron Walter book but also, or at first Norvilles “Ambient Findability”.

Btw.: Building Findable Websites only covers the on-site SEO basics, adding some microfomats and the likes, if you really want to do web design for findability you need to read the Web Design for ROI, a book that will change your professional life forever.


Findablity resources:

• The Age of Findability - Boxes and Arrows: The design behind the design
• Ambient Findability
• Digital Web Magazine - Ambient Findability
• O’Reilly Media | Ambient Findability
• findability.org - by Peter Morville
• DonnaM » Blog Archive » Usability testing for findability
• A List Apart: Articles: Ambient Findability: Findability Hacks
• Use Old Words When Writing for Findability (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox)
• A List Apart: Articles: Findability, Orphan of the Web Design Industry
• Building Findable Websites: Web Standards, SEO, and Beyond
• Findability Bliss Through Web Standards | An Event Apart New Orleans April 2008
• SEO and Findability blog: LJ Banks — findability expert

From now on please refer to me as findability expert, maybe this way I can outsmart the SEO haters

This post has been sponsored by Nstein*

[Update May 15th, 2008: New image added]

Image by Kevin Rosseel

You think on-page SEO is dead? It hasn’t even begun! To be clear, your website is a goldmine and you haven’t even started to dig for the gold.

In my SEO 2.0 blog I have covered blogging, social media and the likes to the point of excess. At the same time I have dismissed most of on-page SEO as obsolete or as built in basics of even the simplest CMS software.

Do you think on-page SEO is just about h1 tags, meta descriptions or enhancing website copy with keywords? Now think again.

Consider using the term on-site SEO referring to the whole site not just each page for itself. Now add the adjective “semantic“.

The semantic web (often called Web 3.0) and its search are about meaning.

Google matches phrases without knowing what they mean. Semantic search is based on understanding what the search query is about. What if you could use software to determine the meaning of your own content and categorize it in topical clusters?

You could:

• Make users stick with your website as a reader would always find related articles to the current one he just read
• Serve contextual advertising like Google does
• Automatically improve indexation with “internal links” cross-linking related content
  

Doesn’t sound revolutionary? Well, what does it mean then? Nowadays you will typically structure news by location and topics. For instance Europe or business are used as categories. So a story about fuel shortage in Great Britain could be found in Europe and business categories. Now what about other relations? What if the story is related to another one from outside Europe or one that is not about business directly? A reader keen on reading the latest energy and fuel news would not find anything of interest anymore amidst bizarre stories from Europe about a father hiding his daughter in a cellar for over 20 years or singer Amy Whinehouse and her legal problems.
Yes, these stories have been been put together in Europe on CNN (April 28th, 2008). The reader will leave.

With semantic SEO implemented on your website you can make the reader find several stories related to this one, automatically.

Using this example: There are a few related stories out there right now: In Brazil president Lula speaks out about bio fuel , in Singapore the oil price reaches a new height, Venezuela and Iran plan to work more closely together (thus limiting western access to oil). Also there is another story about pirates freeing hostages near Somalia. Now the first three are obvious. The fourth one is related too but how? Pirates and other militants are also increasingly a problem in Nigeria where they attack oil tankers.

How did I find out? I used a news aggregator that uses semantic web and search methodology to determine which articles and news are related.

• So instead of reading just one article or page I read 5 increasing page views per visit or stickiness
• The website could show contextual ads about alternative energy or energy saving
• Older news about the same topic could have been directly linked to the latest news automatically. Google could spider them and rank them up as relevant again.
  

Now this means

• an increase of 500% in page views per visit for this example
  
• serving highly relevant ads with most probably high click-thrus
• new crawling and better ranking for several articles resulting in more targeted search traffic
  

All this just with semantic SEO implemented on-site. Nowadays most of your content gets wasted. You can let machines dig for the hidden gold in your archives instead. So how do I do that or rather which solution can do it for me?

I do not know myself yet. I was aproached by Nstein, a company that is “powering online publishing” for large publishers across the globe to help them spread the word about their latest webinar. This free webinar is about “Semantic Tagging & Automated Discovery Strategies: For SEO, Editorial, Contextual Advertising and more“.

Now as even I needed some explanation what this really means I decided to write a sponsored post* for them. It does not make sense to advertise for something that nobody understands.

I was approached by potential advertisers in the past but never conceded to run the ads due to the lack of credibility of their products or companies as well as lack of focus at my audience or value for my readers.

Now the Nstein representative could convince me on the phone that this latest webinar can really be of use for my readers. Especially he cited the above mentioned news aggregator as one example where Nstein has already successfully implemented semantic methods for on-site SEO I just call semantic SEO.

Anyways, you can be sure that any method that looks like SEO 2.0 to me and that allows to potentially double, triple or even increase the number of page views by 500% in my case will make me want to cover it.

Now as I feel a little uneasy about this first sponsored post* and wonder if it’s too sneaky to write for an advertiser about something I want some feedback from you if this post was useful or not and if it’s acceptable to write posts I was asked for on my own blog and getting paid for them. Until now I only got paid for guest blogging on other blogs.



*This is a sponsored post. It’s not an ad. Also it’s not a sponsored review. It just introdocuces a topic I was asked to write about by the sponsor. The text is written by myself and only reflects my opinion so it’s not even an advertorial. It’s not automatically an endorsement of the above mentioned offer.

Google baby by skoop.

As most of us know it is often really difficult to build websites for both the user and Google.

Google still needs to be assisted in finding and assessing a website’s worth to such an extent that it can break the user experience altogether.

Of course there are plenty of CSS solutions for Google’s weaknesses. Although I do not like the term tricks I have to refer to them as CSS tricks as in fact these are workarounds to suit Google. Google spiders are still unable to recognize most advanced web technologies like Flash or AJAX.

Google spiders are like little children, you really have to assist them to find stuff and understand it.

There are other search engines of course but they struggle even more so to keep it simple I will concentrate on Google, which is the by far dominant search engine in most of the western markets.

On a side note: “Trick” sounds like “black hat SEO” or cheating search engines. Well, take a look at them yourself and tell me whether I’m cheating or whether Google is making web development a pain in the back.

OK, then. Let me present to the top 7 CSS tricks for better SEO in no particular order:


CSS Pagination
Google has a serious problem with ranking long articles which are divided into several parts. Also long one page articles will outrank short ones usually. Apart from that the usability is key in making your visitors read the whole article so you don’t want users neither to scroll for ages nor to click a link and send a request each time they want to get to the next page of your article.
The solution is CSS pagination. Isn’t it hidden text though? Hidden text is one of the oldest “tricks” to cheat search engines, webmasters still employ it and my potential clients sometimes wonder why they don’t rank while using hidden text. So hands off hidden text! Well, if Digg, your number one anti-SEO site, uses it can it be “black hat SEO”?
Anyways this way you can divide the content into easily digestible parts while still having it on one page. Take heed to another limitation of Google: The crawler might not crawl a very large page in its entirety.

Absolute Positioning
The higher your content is on a given page the more it counts for Google. Google does not see a page like a human being, it crawls the code. Thus the higher your content is in the code the better. So if you have a complex site with lots of menus, scripts and other gimmicks you should consider absolute positioning otherwise Google might even stop crawling your page before it reaches the main content. You can place the actual content high up in the code, at the top, while the users will see it in the middle of the page below the menus.

Styling h1, h2, h* Headlines
In HTML the h1 headline appears huge by default, the h2 is still much larger than the rest of the page copy etc. Many web designers thus used divs and spans for headlines for years to style them the way needed. Now Google won’t know what the headline is unless you tell Google by using h* tags. It’s like in 1999: You really need to use h1, h2 etc.
Of course you don’t have to make huge h1 headlines like in pre CSS times. Just style the h1 the size you want, also you can get rid off the line-height etc. which h1 headline force upon you by using the display: inline; attribute.

Sponsored Message
	Free Webinar on How to Use Semantic Tagging & Automated Discovery Strategies for SEO Sign up now!

sIfr/Image Replacement for Headlines
Many people will argue that styling headlines with CSS is not enough for web designers. They are in fact right. I think it’s by now grotesque that we’re in 2008 and we still are limited to less than a dozen basic standard “web safe” fonts for web design. We were meant to have flying cars by 2000 and now we do not even have real typography on the web. Many people have tackled this problem with image replacement techniques for headlines, which in short will hide the original headline and insert an image in it’s place. Some of them are fairlydavnaced , others are very simple. No isn’t it hidden text again? Yes, it is! Also some of these methods will hamper your SEO efforts moredfirectly as the crawlers won’t recognize the headline anymore.
There is one popular image replace technique called sIfr which is by now officially approved by Google. It uses Flash to display the headline in any font you wish but in code the h* tags are still recognizable.

Using Lists (ul/ol)
Most SEO experts agree by now that so called keyword density is not a major positive ranking factor. It means that mentioning your keywords 20 times instead of 5 will not make you rank better in Google. You may get penalized for so called keyword stuffing though. Now what to do in case where you really need to use the same words over and over? Use an unordered or ordered list. Google allows repetition in lists without penalizing you.
With CSS you can style lists in any way you desire so that if you do not want a list to be clearly visible list style it accordingly. Some people do even a whole site design without tables and layers (divs) or even spans.

Nofollow Attribute
Contrary to what some people believe the nofollow attribute like in a href=”page.html” rel=”nofollow” does not prevent a page from being crawled by Google. As nofollow does not help against Spam whatsoever, as it was its original purpose at which it failed completely, what then is nofollow good for from the webmaster perspective?

Matt Cutts of Google recommends the so called pagerank sculpting. It means assigning PageRank to the important pages while not wasting it on a contact page for instance.

Yes, Google assumes that the page with the most internal links is the most important one so if you link from all your pages to the contact page it will be the most important page for Google. So you really have to tell Google: Do not mistake this page for the most important one by using the nofollow attribute (not tag!) on the links leading to the contact page.

Pure CSS Menus
While pure CSS menues are not really a trick most people still assume that you need JavaScript or other enhancements to make dynamic menus. Well it’s not true, many advanced CSS only menus offer slick interactivity while being the best choice for Google and other search engine spiders.


Now can you use this methods for cheating Google? Well, I guess you can, but these techniques are so low level that Google won’t count it anyway. For all those who mistake SEO with spam: Spam works on a whole different level nowadays so using stuff like hidden text is ridiculous by now. These CSS tricks can help you with legitimate SEO efforts. I do not like the term white hat SEO as it acknowledges that there is another kind of SEO (I don’t agree with that premise, I rather divide: Either it’s SEO or it’s spam). Nonetheless: It’s all white hat SEO if you ask me.

Now you might argue this is not SEO 2.0, these are SEO basics known for years but it’s not really the case, the web developer community is rather keen on web standards to the point of dogma where for instance absolute positioning is frowned upon. So most people won’t use it. Also if you want to learn more about advanced SEO 2.0 methods you might want to read more in this blog. It’s full of SEO 2.0.

Website vs Blog: What’s the difference?

What is the single most important difference between “conventional” or “static” websites and blogs? Many people will probably reply

1. Blogs are dynamic, websites are not
2. Blogs encourage conversation, websites do not
3. Blogs offer RSS, websites do not
4. Blogs publish current news, websites do not
5. Blogs create the blogosphere while websites are in a way standalone islands

Now you already might suspect where I’m at: All of the differences, with the exception of #5 maybe are not true (anymore)!

• You have all kinds of websites which are enhanced in a way that they are not static but dynamic in their nature and I do not speak about static HTML vs PHP
• Also you do not need a blog to lead a conversation. Asides from forums, wikis and all kinds of Web 2.0 sites any site can add a comment form or a connection to a forum which will enable users to engage in a conversation and also engage you, the publisher, in one.
• There also plenty of services which will create an RSS feed for any website etc. based sites.
  

News sites like CNN or BBC are of course not blogs but they publish news and naturally the two are not the only ones. Everybody can create a non-blog website that deals with the latest news, buzz or products.

While there is no extra sphere for websites, the so called blogosphere is not as tangible either I would argue. Nonetheless this is indeed a difference somehow. Is this the most important difference? No, it isn’t.

It has been a long time…

What is the most important difference between websites and blogs? It’s about being up to date or timeless. Or it’s about being still valid. The info at a blog is expected to be valid at a certain point in time while the content on a website is expected to be timeless.

Of course there are plenty of exceptions to this but generally you assume that a website you end up on which is not a blog and which has no date marking when it was published contains still valid information. In contrast you will often not even read a blog entry after noticing that it was published two years or sometimes even 2 months ago.

When I started my SEO 2.0 blog I was surprised that my theme, DM Bloodless, has the date removed from the posts. After realizing it I thought about it and decided to let the date to be hidden.

Why?

I wanted my blog to both a timeless website and an up to date blog.

A few weeks later I published a post called 5 Dirty Blogging Tricks which covered this decision in a short sentence.

.

Blogsites combine the best of two worlds.

After almost 9 months of blogging at SEO 2.0 I am convinced that it was the right decision. Combining the advantages of websites and blogs is not as easy as I imagines though.

What to do?

You have either to refrain from publishing news or you have to find a way to deal with the fact that they are not timeless. You can:

• Add a date in the content of the post: “As October 2007 it has…”
• Add updates to a post “Update 11. December, 2007: The service has been discontinued by now”
• Delete old posts or rewrite them.

Who wants to update old posts which are rarely visited if it all? Well, I don’t in most cases. You can change the date though and republish them on top though. This way you save some time by not posting a completely new posting while also offering new insights, perspective or another update.

Which one of the two do you prefer?

Think about it and please add your opinion:

• What dis/advantages do you think this combination of blogsites does have?
• How else can you combine the advantages of both without doubling the workload?
• Do you update or delete your old postings?
• Am I right at all? What is the most striking difference between blogs and websites in your opinion?
• Who will become the next president of the United States of America?

Thus I won’t tell you that WordPress 2.5 has just been released this weekend!

First off: The introduction of real links in comments via the dofollow plugin has been a huge success, especially as I am ranking high for both “dofollow” and “dofollow plugin” in Google by now because my article about the end of conventional SEO was so popular and has been reprinted or translated numerous times including my “dofollow” link.

Dofollow encouraged participation substantially, moreover what most people do not mention in this context: It made this blog a really friendly place.

Commenters who also want a link rarely will offend you. So by far most coments are friendly, helpful and adding some new perspective, update or information. In short: People commenting on SEO 2.0 are truly contributing. In many cases I even rank for long tail queries that are found only in my comments.

Blogging is like inviting people to your barbecue party: They get invited and receive free food while you enjoy a nice get together.

I use Akismet for spam protection and thus have rarely problems with real spammers who let robots comment automatically on thousands of blogs. There are sometimes problems with false positives in case of people Akismet markes accidentally as spam. Aaron Wall of SEO book was flagged as spam by Akismet and one of my eager contributors david deangelo has been filtered time and again even after I made him a “member” of this blog. This is a bug that sucks but I will de-spam your comments if you contact me by email, my adress is onreact at onreact.com

Many people complain about so called “manual spam” which is an oxymoron in a way. Spam is an unsolicited message and if you allow comments (by people) you can’t call it spam in this case. Thus comments made by humans not robots are not spam in 99% of cases. Nonetheless some things annoy me too:

1. People commenting with a name like “SEO Company” or “Real Estate California” because I want people to comment not companies or services, especially if the keywords have nothing to do with SEO or other topics of this blog.

2. One liners saying something like “thanks, great article” because I don’t know if they are made by robots or not if they do not refer to the post.

3. People who do not read the article but comment based on the title and it’s keywords because it’s just ridiculous to state “I also like three-way links” if I just wrote that I hate them.

4. People using German or other non-English keywords as their “name” because it is impolite to exclude the majority of my readers who do not understand.

5. Commenters linking to specific subpages like domain.com/my-new-product because I’m not your catalogue.

6. People adding a signature in their comment because you already got a link, you don’t need a signature, that’s greedy.

7. Commenters who disagree with me, because I never err you damn naysayers!

On good days I will just approve your comments, on normal days I will change your “name” to something which sounds actually like a name or remove your URL but on bad days I will spam your comment or delete it.

Spamming your comment means that you get flagged on other Wordpress blogs too so you probably do not want to risk that.

There are easy solutions or exceptions for most of these cases where both you and I can live with them or they even add some additional value. Tim Nash, a SEO consultant from the UK has a nice technical solution implemented: He added an extra text box for your favorite anchor text. This is really neat but I’m too lazy to hack my WordPress comment form and thus I prefer the easiest solution, introduced in part by my favorite blog consultant, Michael Martine. He just combines two things, his name and his job description.

So check out these simple rules of blog commenting netiquette, they might not apply everywhere but they will help you not be thrown out at SEO 2.0 and in other places probably too.

1. You can write: Michael Martine, Blog Consultant. You can also link to to an about page covering you. Also if you do not want to disclose your name or job position, you can even write something like Bob of Miller Real Estate or at least leave your initials to enable me to address you: AJ of Miller Real Estate but don’t write Miller Real Estate, AJ. Imagine being on a party again: You say your name first when you introduce yourself and then you tell people what you do for a living.
2. I appreciate people being thankful for a post but unless your refer to the specific post or I know your blog URL I have no way of determining whether you are a bot or not. So write something like “thank your for the post, it helped me with …”
3. If you want a piece of meat at a barbecue you don’t just drop in, take it and leave the party instantly. Stay for a minute to read the post, say “hi” and then leave.
4. Do you speak German addressing people on a party where nobody understands it? Try to translate at least. So do not write Web design Köln, but Mark of Dom Web Webdesign in Cologne
5. Imagine yourself on a party when asked about what you do for a living telling people, “Dirt Devil M110002!” So, as I said above, a page about you is OK, your homepage vacuumcleaners.com also but not a specific product page. Akismet will spam you in most cases you use subpages anyways.
6. A barbecue party is not a trade fair, you do not wear your name plate on your lapel. You just introduce yourself, that’s enough. So skip the additional signature.
7. Now imagine someone entering a barbecue party shouting: This place sucks, meat is murder, you dirty bastards stink! I guess such a person gets thrown out immediately. If you disagree, do it politely, with style after at least reading what this site is about. Of course I will delete trolls who offend me for all “SEOs being spammers“.
   

Did I forget something? Probably, feel free to add your take on the subject of blog commenting netiquette an barbecue parties in the comments below Introduce yourself and be nice to the other guest.

WordPress is, you might already suspect it, the most popular blogging platform aka blog CMS out there. Thee are plenty of good reasons to use it although WordPress has some major drawbacks (it’s bloated, can be easily hacked, has a super-ugly admin interface etc). Nonetheless I use WordPress for more than one blog, indeed I use WordPress since 2003 for numerous projects.

WordPress lets you change your URL structure with ease. That’s nice but also there are some pitfalls.

Why should you rewrite your URLs in the first place?

• to make them readable and self explanatory
• to make them Google friendly
• for better archiving

Now said that there is no one way to do that. There is no ideal URL structure for WordPress. It depends on what you need.

Just think about how you use your WordPress installation:

• as a blog (most probably but not necessarily)
• as a website
• as a news source
• a an archive or library for real or metaphorically speaking

Now there are several ways to “design”, as in so called URL design, your WordPress URLs. After years of practice my favorites are…

Stop, first I want to show you what the average WordPress URLs look like:

1. domain.com/?p=123
2. domain.com/category-name/seo-2-0-basics-wordpress-url-design/
3. domain.com/2008/03/15/seo-2-0-basics-wordpress-url-design

None of them are perfect, most of them have significant drawbacks.

#1 is short, no need for “tinyurl” services and it does not use any rewrite rules. I like that in some cases, for instance for blogs that have large numbers of short posts, then you can show off by having a four or five digit post number. It tells you nothing about the content though. Imagine this link in an email. Would you click it or rather a link like that: domain.com/britney-spears-naked

#2 lets you categorize your content but as WordPress categories do not work as desired, you can’t really choose which category is the most important one if you ascribe more than one and WP will almost randomly choose one, it’s worthless. Also, the “/” at the end mimics a directory which a post is not. Do you really want to trick your readers you dirty black hat SEO?

#3 is great for a historical view bu most blog readers expect current posts on a blog. Do you really think someone will click on a link like domain.com/2005/03/15/breaking-news ?

Now lets take a look at my own URL:
domain.com/seo-2-0-basics-wordpress-url-design

I love simplicity and I wanted my blog to appear to be a real website with real content not just ephemeral blog postings. It is not ideal for several reasons or rather purposes though.
Let’s say I make a list of 10 items and the add some more. I can’t change the URL though, as it would yield a 404 not found error n the old one.

Consider this URL again: domain.com/?p=123
Now changing the headline does not have any impact on it. Now wouldn’t it be great to combine these two? Yes, as I am a man of “as well” instead of “either or” you can and should.

The solution is fairly simple:
domain.com/123/seo-2-0-basics-wordpress-url-design

This URL has a major advantage:

Long URLs send via email often get cut at the end or otherwise destroyed in the process of sending.

It does not matter with this one.

• domain.com/123/seo-2-0-basics-wordpress-url-design
• domain.com/123/seo-2-0-basics-
• domain.com/123/seo-2-0-basics-%FC%DF%F6%E4
• domain.com/123/
• domain.com/?p=123

will all successfully lead to the same post.

Unfortunately this is not enough in many cases. As Google is quite stupid and does not know you are a blog unless you call yourself a blog you might want to use

domain.com/blog/123/seo-2-0-basics-wordpress-url-design

or better, if you want to rank for the often searched for keyword+blog combination:

domain.com/seo-blog/123/seo-2-0-basics-wordpress-url-design

You can achieve this either by uploading your WordPress installation into the real “blog” or “seo blog” directory on you server via FTP or by rewriting again. WordPress lets you add a so called “category_base”.

Many people still want to use the date in their URLs as they write news blogs and for better archiving. You do not have to fake three directories with slashes (”/”) doing that.
When I want to retain the date I use either one of these two URL structures:

domain.com/20080315
or
domain.com/2008-03-15

Also

domain.com/2008.03.15
is possible.

WordPress will still allow you to access the years as in “domain.com/2008″, months or days.

Now you still have to decide which URL or Permalink design is the best for you.

The implementation of the desired URL structure is shown here at Wordpress.org or here with some screenshots.

There are also some dirty tricks as I like to call them

For instance you can any suffix after the URL. So instead of the good old “.html” or “.php” yo can add anything you want. In my case something like “.seo” would be perfect.
domain.com/seo-2-0-basics-wordpress-url-design.seo

Hello Readers,

There are some changes on SEO 2.0 to announce:

1. Blog clean up
2. PageRank lottery
3. New focus

On Saturdays there always was clean up day in my family when I was a kid. So I cleaned up my blog or uncluttered it like Skellie would say. I dropped the useless affiliate ads that made no money at all. Moreover I dropped elements that were superfluous, e.g.:

• The huge RSS icon, which was annoying after a while
• The Netscape bookmark icon, as Propeller is even more useless than Netscape was…

I won a 5 in the Google PageRank lottery today and do you know why? Because I commented three times on Remarkablogger and he’s got a 7.

There will be a new focus on SEO 2.0 - I will practice what I preach and concentrate more on socializing and the tools that facilitate that.

Therefore I not only added the CLIQ widget where the marvellous Blah, Blah! Technology blog joined me, I also will try out the Blogcatalog community (I’m still “pending”) which does not look as crappy as the more popular MyBlogBlog.

I won’t add the widget but instead the “Rate my blog” dropdown (see at the right below) which ads a little value at least.

I’m still looking for a Sphinn add on that does not look wacky…

Also I added bookmark buttons for DZone (developer “Reddit”) and Wykop (Polish “Digg”) as those two are my target audiences in some ways. I’m a web developer born in Poland originally.

As soon the head aches go away I probably will write something more useful again and add links to this post (done)

Some of you might have already noticed: A guest post of mine called 7 Must Read Design + Usability + SEO Articles was published at the Small Business Hub blog.

As the target audience over there are not the hard core web developers, SEOs or early adopters we did not include some of the advanced or rather professional resources.

Now here they are, 5 more design + usability + SEO articles but please take a look at the 7 listed in the original list, otherwise it’s like reading a book skipping two thirds of it.

1. First or rather #8 read Kim Krause Berg’s objection to #7 from the original list: Usability and SEO - Red Light, Green Light
2. Then check out how usability experts work for large websites, Jens Meiert offers the ultmate methodology: 20 (Alternate) Ways to Focus on Users
3. While at it, take a look how Google employees themselves deal with usability: Some Recent Google Papers on Usability and User Testing
   
4. After that, imagine how users really feel when interacting with your site: How Do Users Really Feel About Your Design?
5. If you’re still not an usability expert par excellance go pro with this list of PDF resources: UPA 2007: Patterns - Blueprints for Usability

So the clean dozen is complete. These 12 articles will make you improve the web like no other. Start now and keep till the break of dawn.

Btw. the first post was hugely popular on Digg until it was banned for being “SEO”.

So do usability and SEO get along? Yes, they do. The even prefer a threesome with design!

As an Internet addict I read more blogs on SEO, making money, blogging and a plethora of other topics daily than other people do in a year. So I’ll get a good overview quickly which blogs really matter or stand out while other people have to stick to the same old blogs. If you have more time to spend on blog reading take into consideration checking out those 10 blogs that I collected during my virtual journeys in the last week or two.

To understand how many others have not made the list just picture me stumbling, scanning and blog hopping for an hour or two every morning, during lunch break, at the evening and at night before going to sleep. Countless blogs haven’t made it. On the other hand it’s easy to count the remaining: 10 fresh blogs about SEO, making money, blogging etc.:

• Make Money Online with Dosh Dosh - Dosh Dosh is not really new, but it’s comparatively new and many people still don’t know it although he surpasses John Chow or even Problogger.net offering a unique point of view and unmatched deep analysis of online phenomenons
• AjaxNinja.com - The AjaxNinja does not cover predominantly Ajax as the name might suggest, this blogger feels at home on the Net bringing awesome lists of useful resources for blogging, traffic enhancement, broader web development
• Codswallop - Codswallop of the Cogniview company tackles daily routine with an innovative but down to earth approach
• David Airey - David Airey writes about a wide range of topics, the freelance designer manages to combine all of them with ease
• Chris Garrett on New Media - Chris Garrett combines professionalism with empathy and a keen mind, he offers fresh insights you won’t find anywhere else
• mGarrett - Michael Garrett is not be confused with Chris above, but his blog is at least as interesting, he mixes overall Web 2.0, with social media and search topics, no wonder he’s a writer at Profy, one of my favorite Web 2.0 blogs along with Webware. He contributes also to Mahalo, the “human powered search” I described recently as a Google alternative for broad topics
• Vandelay Website Design - Vandelay is of course not new on the blog but fresher than ever covering design, coding, blogging and SEO. Without doing it on purpose I end up reading his blog daily anyways, don’t know yet how he does that
• CLM Blog - The Closed Loop Marketing corporate blog is full of how to articles stuffed with advanced methods of blog optimization, usability and SEO. Beautiful blog header btw.
• Pro Blog Design - Pro Blog Design made by Michael Martin, not to be mixed up with the Micheal Martine of the similar sounding Better Blogging, has a great way of presenting useful advice for bloggers on how to make blogs “profitable, usable and attractive”. I don’t know about the profitability but the other two are already obvious.
• Cbarker.WS - This guy addresses the new webmaster and offers solid tools, SEO tips, and some stuff that even I wasn’t aware of. He’s not perfect as he tends to over optimization, but who is? I certainly am a “returning visitor” to his sites.

You might recognize some of those above mentioned as you will find them in my list of my StumbleUpon friends. You see, socializing on the web is the best way of blog marketing, be active and other bloggers will notice you. You also noticed that I do not solely concentrate on the topics mentioned above, SEO, making money and blogging. You need a holistic perspective to succeed online as nobody will want to read about only those three topics all the time.