SEO By Hand With WordPress

So among the sites I have spawned (GenesisDriven.com, AndrewPeng.net, Over-Boost.net) I’ve been reading on how to do SEO (Search Engine Optimization) to make it faster and easiar for Google and other search engines to index my site and make it searchable. According to this page:

Display a three-digit number. The URL for each article must contain a unique number consisting of at least three digits. For example, we can’t crawl an article with this URL: http://www.google.com/news/article23.html. We can, however, crawl an article with this URL: http://www.google.com/news/article234.html. Keep in mind that if the only number in the article consists of an isolated four-digit number that resembles a year, such as http://www.google.com/news/article2006.html, we won’t be able to crawl it. 

And so I set about setting the permalink structure for mod_rewrite to this structure:

/posts/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%%post_id%-%postname%.html

Which is great, because WordPress will automatically redirect any of the standard permalink structures to your custom one, so people linking in will still have their links work. Content like pictures still use the same link structure so thats not anything to worry about. See where I prefixed %post_id% with %day% – this allows early posts with post_id’s with less than three digits to get indexed too.

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Eight Ways to Help Google News Better Crawl Your Site

I didn’t used to be a nut about SEO (Search Engine Optimizing) but now juggling multiple websites and reading into their publication has made me take another look to increase traffic. Here’s a shortie posted on the Google News Blog on what makes it easiest for their crawler to index your website, making it easy to find in a Google News search. Click here for the link.

From time to time, publishers ask us what they can do to improve their listings in Google News. The following are eight of the most frequent, and useful, pieces of advice we give out. Why eight? Because at Google, we love powers of 2.

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