As I have mentioned before, I run idek.net, which is a url shortener. These are great for places where characters are at a premium. Some people have asked me how the url redirects work and how they affect SEO. This quick video gives a basic overview of 301 redirects which is what idek.net uses to get your from a short url to a long one.

[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owVh6PX9bw0[/video]

Other Resources:

• URL redirection on Wikipedia
• An example analytics page from idek.net

Google has just launched SearchWiki within their search results. This toolset allows users to alter the results that they receive from google. They can move results up or down, add new results, or even remove them from the results. You can also add comments to search results.

Now, I should make it clear that this does not affect page rank, or even the results that other people see when doing searches. However, other people who are logged into google can see, via the SearchWiki icons, what users are doing with results. This allows the SearchWiki community to function much like reddit or Digg.

We’ve always said that the best search engine is the one that understands what the individual user wants … SearchWiki really puts that in action: this is an even deeper level of customisation than we’ve offered before, because people know best what search results they are looking for.

Juergen Galler, director of product management at Google

This is a great step forward for google. Rather than entirely trying to mathematically determine optimal search results they are actually able to incorporate opinions from people who are doing the searches. So while this won’t have an affect on most googlers, it does allow them to start to harness the massive community of people out there who want to work together to find better results.

I can only hope that this is a start of something that will provide more power to the social networks of users who are depending on google every day. Moving google a bit more towards the digg/reddit model could help to make results more relevant and also drive more involvement. Of course reddit and digg are also gameable, often times political or underhanded forces take advantage of this to bias results on the front pages of these site. Google is no where near prepared to give their rankings or results over to the mob. This method does seem like a safe way to allow those crowds to have their say without jeopardizing Google’s standing as the best way to search. Learn more about Google SearchWiki:

• Google SearchWiki tool allows user to personalise search
• Google’s Help topic on SearchWiki
• Google’s Blog: SearchWiki: Make Search Your Own

Building on my last post, Chris Brogan just put up a guest post on mashable about building and managing your brand on the web – whether it’s personal or business. Definitely more comprehensive than mine. Definitely worth the read.

Remember, your brand is your responsibility, and it’s not going to happen on its own.

Before you start posting on your site you should set it up to have the right types of permalinks for your posts. Permalinks are links that go directly to an individual blog post. They are important because the text that comprises the link actually has an impact on it’s search engine ranking.

Links that are rich in accurate keywords and short on junk will improve your ranking.

In order to get this first step right we are going to have to do two things, create quality post titles and get your blog to leverage them in your permalinks, so let’s get to it!

In this post I’ll be talking about how to change settings in wordpress, but most blogging tools will have similar functionality, and these optimization tips definitely apply no matter what blogging tool you are using.

Permalinks and You

The permalinks that wordpress ships with use IDs to locate posts, descriptive keywords are in short supply. To fix this go to Settings -> Permalinks within wordpress, select Custom Structure, and enter /%category%/%postname%/.

If you wish to go even shorter you can just use /%postname%/ which will basically just be the title of your post. However, just using postname, while bringing keywords more to the forefront, can sometimes cause problems when attempting to access other pages or plugins, so I prefer adding the category as well.

Now that you have wordpress doing the right thing you have to make the effort by providing good titles for your posts.

Not Just Good Titles

Alright, so it’s more than just witty titles with good keywords. In wordpress, just under where you set the title for a post, there is an area where you can edit the permalink. This is where you have a chance to shine. Often times your title may be cute, enticing, or flat out long; by editing the permalink you can ensure that you have the accurate keywords you need without any of that distracting debris.

Always remember to separate you words with hyphens, as they tell the search engine to look at the terms individually.

It’s Never Too Late To Start

I said you should do this before you start posting, but many of you already have a blog. Don’t fret you can change settings well into the game, but to ensure that you don’t break existing search results you need to do a little more leg-word. Check out this plugin that allows you to change your permalinks on an existing blog.

A quick sidenote, for those interested, wordpress also has page that talks about How to use permalinks.

I just got adamcovati.com up an running today. I’ve seeded it with a number of posts (comments, links, and all) from my previous site that are relevant to the focus that I have here. As I move forward this will be a good resource for all my ruminations and rumblings with respect to email marketing, social media and marketing, as well as other aspects of marketing (SEO/SEM) and branding.

Since I just started this blog, I figured it would be good idea for me to track everything I do to optimize my search placement. Wordpress is setup to help you get there without too much effort from a technical point of view. The hard part of course is continuing to create and involve yourself in quality content.

Look for blog posts coming with information about how I am optimizing this site for search engines, and how you can get your site performing it’s best.