Let Paris Hilton teach as our lesson for today. ;)  I have written many times before that I am not a very technical person, and I would never profess to be one. I am learning all technical terms mostly from experiments and from reading tutorials and other blogs.  I am always looking for ways to optimize, maximize and monetize.   Hmm, I think that’s a great motto. I’ll claim that to be mine right this minute.

Pro Gobbler says: “Optimize, Maximize and Monetize!!! “

This brings me to my point about Permalinks and how to use it to your advantage. According to Wordpress,

Permalinks are the permanent URLs to your individual weblog posts, as well as categories and other lists of weblog postings. A permalink is what another weblogger will use to refer to your article (or section), or how you might send a link to your story in an e-mail message. Especially when they are used to link to individual postings, once a story is posted, the URL to it should be permanent, and never change — hence permalink.

When I purchased this blog template, I was a bit annoyed that the permalinks weren’t set up to work using the title of the posts.   Other free WP themes out there have it included.   The option is already available for WP users, all you need to do is to activate and choose the format you wish to use.  Every time I activated it to use the post title, my entries produces a 404-Page Not Found error.   I really needed to make the Permalink feature work on this site and let me tell you why.

Without the permalinks, all my posts will be presented with a URL that looks like this:

http://progobbler.net/?p=24

It is okay and I wouldn’t mind if it remained that way as long as I didn’t know that permalinks add value and traffic since post titles are used and indexed by search engines.   If your URL is registered as it is above, when people search for content - it doesn’t matter whether you wrote about global warming, or Paris Hilton - the search engine will not know your about your post or if is relevant. That would be a missed opportunity to bring that traffic to your site.

What if Permalink is activated (and works on the theme!! GRRRR!), how will your URL display and how could it be used to generate traffic?

http://progobbler.net/2008/02/08/another-income-stream-ebay-and-paypal-series/

Let’s try to search for “Ebay and Paypal” on our search to see if the search will locate our post?

Excellent!  The title used for your posts, including the URL are all keys to a search. I didn’t want this blog to miss that opportunity and to think that I purchased this theme as opposed to a free theme, I was expecting that activating the Permalinks option should have been a default but it wasn’t.

My advice: Pay special attention to the titles of your posts.   If you want people to find your site, make sure you use the KEY word you want them to find in the title, in the tags and ALWAYS use PERMALINKS using the post title.   Blogger.com uses Permalinks as a default, and WP has a common option available for use.

In addition, another thing that I found very interesting that adds traffic to my sites was the way I labeled images that I post on my blogs.   The image of Paris Hilton you see above could have been labeled as 777.jpg.    Instead,  the image was labeled it as paris_hilton.jpg by the blogger who posted the picture on his/her site.

Let’s try and search for “Paris Hilton” using Google Images. Here’s what came up:

If I right-click on the very first picture or photo shown in this image search and try to save the file, this is what I will see.

Notice the naming convention used for the photo.  Included in the label is the word “paris_hilton”.   Since the search was concentrated on the words “paris+hilton” - the very first image shown is one that is labeled so.   In order for me to view this image, I had to click on it and it led me to a the blog that posted the image.  Regardless of how I got there, I call that - traffic.    Simple -  but traffic is traffic.

So, two things for today:

• If you’re on Wordpress - (thanks to Thess for the correction) Permalinks are already available for you. Go to Options>>Click on Permalinks>>Choose your format. I chose to display the title of the post and the date. This way, the title will be indexed as well.
• If you’re on Blogger.com - No worries - you already have it.
  • When purchasing a theme - If you’re technical, you may be able to set up and configure the theme later without a problem but if you’re not, purchase a theme that is Permalink-able right off the shelf.
• Label your post titles and images with keywords you need to generate to your site.

I hope I was able to impart a few things to help you increase your site’s traffic. These are all based from experience and not on any technical or programming knowledge. Anyone who is technical may be able to comment and provide other reasons why it works that way it does.

Oh, and by the way - I got the Permalinks working!!  A little research and reading did some good.

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