Search Engine Optimisation Thanks to Wordpress and Permalinks
Category: Blogging, SEO, Web Development
The first thing I did after creating this site a few months ago was install Google Analytics. I’ve already spoken about what a great service they provide. Anyway, after messing about in Analytics, I found the feature for viewing “keywords”.
Basically, I can see that a) people are finding my site by searching Google and b) what keywords they are entering. And the thing that struck me was how well Cherry Street was performing in Google. I was appearing on the first page of results after 1 week!
For example, the the most popular search phrase that brings visitors to my site is “crackdown hidden orbs”.
20 people have come to Cherry Street after searching for that phrase. And I had no idea why! I mean, I did post an article about the game “Crackdown” and it talks about “hidden” levels. But why should my site appear on the first page of Google results, when there are dozens of other sites out there talking about the same thing?!
Well think I’ve found the answer.
Apparently, it’s well known that Wordpress is optimised for Search Engines. Specifically, it uses something called Permalinks to make it very Search Engine friendly.
According to Wordpress, Permalinks make links pretty!
Here’s an ugly link:
http://example.com/?p=N
And here’s a pretty-fied link:
http://example.com/category/name-of-my-post
Google likes it when you have the title and details of your post in the actual URL. And this is something I have used in Cherry Street from the beginning, even though I didn’t realise the benefit until now.
So that answers my question. If you want optimise your site for search engines, look no further than Wordpress and Permalinks.
To find out more, you can visit the Wordpress site.