Almighty Link

If you have a WordPress blog, you must customize your permalink settings to give your posts a fighting chance to rank high in search engines. In this video, Eric Stegemann (@EricStegemann) of Tribus Real Estate shows the March 6 crowd at #SMMOC, the Orange County Social Media Mastermind Roundtable, how to optimize WordPress permalinks for search engines.

For those of you watching with the sound turned down (don’t worry I won’t tell your boss), here are some details mixed in with an overview of what Stegemann explained.

What’s a permalink?

The word permalink is fancy talk for the web address of an individual blog or forum post. It is a blog post’s URL.

Search engines and URLs

Stegemann says the most important item for search engine optimization is your URL. For details about that, read the SEOmoz blog’s post “11 Best Practices for URLs“.

Content before settings

Before any of this technology can help your blog posts’ search engine rankings, organize your posts into a few main categories of content. See Lorelle VanFossen’s post on categories versus tags for help.

WordPress settings

First, an important note: You can’t change this particular WordPress setting on “WordPress.com” blogs (like the one used as an example in the video). Not sure which kind of blog you have? Follow along and you’ll find out soon enough.

From the menu of the left-hand side of your WordPress admin page, click on “Settings” and then “Permalinks.” Take a look at the image on the right. If you don’t see that “Permalinks” option, then you are probably on a WordPress.com blog; you won’t be able to make this change and you should head over to the Problogger post that explains how to move a blog from WordPress.com to WordPress.org.

Once you’re in the Permalinks settings, jot down the option currently selected under “Common Settings.” If “Custom Structure” is on, then also copy the text in that box.

Now, under “Common Settings,” click on “Custom Structure” and then enter “/%category%/%postname%/” (without the quotations) into the box immediately to the right. Here is what your changes should look like:

Once that’s done, hit the “Save Changes” button on the bottom and you’re done.

Everything changes

If you’ve made those changes correctly, every blog post on your site now has a new URL. What happens to links form external sites pointing to those old posts?

I’m not sure exactly how WordPress performs all of its magic, but I just made these changes last night and important links (from Google and from ReadWriteWeb) to my old posts are still working.

If you know of other sites that link to particular posts on your blog, visit at least a couple of those sites now. Make sure that the links to your posts still works. If not, you might want to consider reverting to your old settings.

OC Insight is a half-hour talk show focusing on issues impacting Orange County. It is the product of a partnership between California State University, Fullerton and KCET. In November, I was part of a (“Someone must have messed up. I don’t belong on stage with veterans Jeff Rowe and Jean Pasco!”) three-person panel on an episode called “The Orange County Media Evolution.”

I bit of background: I was initially contacted to be the “experienced blogger and new media practitioner.” By the day of the shoot, things had changed and the representative for the Orange County Register was no longer on the panel. I tried my best to shift gears to be “old media transitioning into new.”

Kudos to OC Insight for making this video available for embedding and for Christopher Bugbee for tracking me down on Twitter. Make sure to visit the show’s web site for a full list of episodes.

By the way, this is my television debut, and this show is in no way affiliated to The Kevin Sablan Show.

Last year, Steve Rubel waved goodbye to blogging and introduced many people to The Steve Rubel Lifestream, powered by Posterous. Since then, Posterous’ traffic has skyrocketed, possibly assisted by  Austin Statesman’s choice to use it to power their A Day in the Sun project.

I don’t intend to switch to Posterous anytime soon (I agree with Mark Krynsky’s thoughts on Posterous as a lifestreaming service), but I did select it recently when I created Freedom Communication’s Social Freedom blog, mostly because of the ability to create posts via email from multiple contributors.

The magic

In the two weeks of using Posterous, a rarely mentioned Posterous feature has totally impressed me. It magically (okay, “programmatically” might be the factually correct word here) transforms web addresses into pictures, videos and audio players.

I’ve created a post on my personal Posterous blog to illustrate this feature in an admittedly overstated way.

The magic is that I didn’t have to download, crop or resize any of the images that you see there. I didn’t have to embed an MP3 widget and tell it where to find the audio file. I didn’t have to copy and paste any embed codes for the videos. I didn’t even have to tell Posterous the width of those videos or images. See, I told you. It’s magic.

Bonus Wordpress magic

Much to my surprise, previewing this blog post showed met that Wordpress also has similar URL-transforming tricks hidden up its already-powerful sleeves.

I now invite all blogging pros to chime in with “how did you not know about this” comments below.

For those who were as shocked about some of this as I was, I’ve copied and pasted what I typed into the Posterous example. Here, you can see how it turned out in Wordpress:

[Read the rest of this entry...]

Last week, I became part of a small team of Freedom Communications employees who will, for 90 days, explore social media and the ways in which the company (which owns over 100 newspapers and eight TV stations) and its employees should participate in social networks.

As part of that experiment, we launched Social Freedom, a blog to track our research and learnings, from each other and other web sites and organizations.

To avoid some redundancy, I will be posting less about social media here on Almighty Link, my personal blog.

Please come join me and my teammates on Social Freedom. The blog is powered by Posterous, so you can “follow” us if you have a Posterous account.

Photo courtesy of Hazarizal Zainodin via Flickr.