Pittsburgh SEO – SEM – SEA | Internet Marketing and Website Design | Blackball Online

http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/news/tribpm/s_624777.html (This post has been retired)

Above was a great article URL on the old Southside clock from the Pittsburgh Tribune Review - Trib PM edition - a little bit of Pittsburghana (if that is a word, kind of like Americana). Anyway, I thought I would break down the blog post name (Permalink) a little to help to clarify the conventions used to name blog posts and why they are important in the SEO for your site.

We want, ideally, for all our blog posts to rank in the search engines on their own. It lends to the credibility of our companies, our sites, and our posts directly. This is where the SEO comes in. In order to do that, the first thing the crawler sees is the blog post name i.e. the Permalink. Then the blog post title. Then the blog content itself. If anything blocks the crawler, it stops. The game is up and it only has that amount of information to go by. Take this fake post title for example:

http://www.blackballonline.com/?23456-ee.html

We've all seen links to blog posts like this above. The search engine is unable to crawl beyond the question mark (?) because special characters are not crawler friendly. So all the crawler sees is our site URL and no more. We've just blown a golden opportunity, and a lot of time to write a post nobody but the searcher inside our blog will ever see.

Back to the original post - http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/news/tribpm/s_624777.html

A breakdown of the Permalink (blog post name) above:

http://www.pittsburghlive.com -                            The URL
x -                                                                       a convention used by the Trib
pittsburghtrib -                                                     the name of the blog
news -                                                                 the category or tag the post is under
tribpm -                                                               the category or tag the post is under
s_624777.html -                                                  the filename

A note or two about the breakdown.
1.) news and tribpm could be tags or categories - I don't know the Trib's nomenclature for titling their blog posts.
2.) the filename s_624777.html - while this is fantastic for Google Blog Search  it says nothing about the post, or the keywords for that matter. When it comes to ranking this, where does Google index it? Under news obviously, but what kind of news? The search engines will have to search the content.

The moral of the story is: If we want Google to index our blog posts and rank for certain keywords, we should eliminate the guessing game and just create what are called pretty Permalinks and stick to these naming conventions. That's why we optimize them using SEO.

About a year ago, Kodak created a position titled "Chief Blogger." The goal is simple: create a one-on-one and highly personal interaction between Kodak and their customers and customers Kodak has yet to meet.  What does this mean? Well, one thing's for sure, someone in corporate America is taking Blogging as a serious business communication medium - and willing to invest and see where "Yankee ingenuity" leads them. Also it'll be interesting to see how quickly other Fortune 500 companies follow suit, because believe me, they're watching. To read a bit more about it click the link below.

http://www.blogherald.com/2008/04/03/kodak-appoints-chief-blogger-dream-job-anyone/

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