10,000 Foot Developer

I’ve been working a little on some SEO at work and learning quite a bit with our resident expert.  It’s kind of funny because I’ve written SEO pieces for a few apps (metadata, deep linking, canonical pieces, under webs etc.) and still as a developer its a whole practice, like doing cms/edm, or service buses, or GWT, or JSF , or Spring-Batch, or Drools/ILog etc.   Just because you know Java, you might not know a practice.

Anyway I read several compelling arguments about WordPress links.  There are probably a few plugins but you can just use the canned permalinks feature in WordPress to make the links “better.”  The arguments from all sides boil down to a balance of these possible requirements:

• Performance:  Apparently site links that are more textual/semantic like <site domain>/category/article name poor in performance.
• Usability:   If you have the canned WordPress link structure with the post id <site domain>/?p=123 ; this is definitely not user-recognizable.  In this case the semantic approach helps a lot.
• Traffic strategy:  If you include a date path like a lot of  sites do, people might not want to go to your site if they see the article is older.   For instance a common link structure like <site domain>/year/month/date/article name might be what you want for news, or not for more timeless content.  This might be moot if a search engine is showing the date of your article anyway in the search.  I heard that if you include this in the link then it might not.
• Search engine rules:  I’ve read that some sites like some Google services want a digital id in the URL.  (Understanding search engine rules is like divining for water half the time; the SEO people always stare up at the ceiling and say “it could be like that, yes, perhaps.”)
• Web Analytics.  if you have unrecognizable URLs and business people are sharing your web analytics reports then you are definitely going to want something semantic in the link.

I’ve chosen <side domain>/post id/article name for my sites which is a standard strategy.   I went this route for analytics and search engine optimization.  The most common link format seems to be <site domain>/year/month/date/article name but I don’t want any dates in my URLs.