For the past few weeks, I have been working on the suggestions in the Website Grader report to improve search engine ranking. In the Off-Page SEO section of the report, besides the all-important inbound links number, there are two seemingly relevant items: being listed in dmoz and in the Yahoo! Directory.

I started with dmoz, as it was referred to as “the largest and most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web”, which sounded impressive to me. For some reason I found it hard to define the category for my blog; finally, I chose Business: Marketing and Advertising: Internet Marketing: Marketing Services as the best fit. Unfortunately, dmoz does not acknowledge a submission and they do not offer any alternate method to follow-up on it, hence the only thing to do is wait. But as of today, waiting has not worked and my blog has not been listed. I guess I could try again, as suggested in this interesting article on the subject.

As for the Yahoo! Directory, I shunned from it after I found out there is a substantial fee for their service ($299 is substantial to me). Instead, I opted for submitting my blog URL for free to Yahoo! Search.

Other actions I have taken after the suggestions in the report: I have added the Alexa traffic rank button to my blog (there is nothing to brag about my rank just yet) and submitted one article to Digg; I bookmarked on del.icio.us myself, maybe something I should not have done…  I also added the Twitter Follow Me button to the side. The little blue bird looks good there, I think.

A rather puzzling statement from Website Grader is the one about “Too many images found”. There is not much to do except for ignoring it: the pictures I have are the gravatars of the top commentators and the image for the e-book cover in the opt-in form. They stay!

One thing that has botehred me a bit is that I could not get the Website Grader badge to show my updated grade after all the above actions (it got up to 82). Since I could not establish the root cause, I decided to remove it. Something similar happened with the Alexa rank button, but this one updates automatically now. I might give the badge a second chance…

There is always more that can be done but I think I have addressed the Website Grader report sufficiently. I should now go back to focus on getting links and continue commenting on other blogs.

Gosh! It took me too long to post again…

In a previous post I talked about the convenience of customizing the posts URL structure to make it more search engine friendly (potentially attracting more traffic to a blog).

But I had not been able to implement that desirable structure without causing my blog to crash when visitors tried to see the comments or leave one…

I digged a little into WordPress Codex to try and figure this out; I soon got overwhelmed by the technical jargon they use there! I did, however, settled down for an intermediate approach: what they call PATHINFO permalinks.

Although they lengthen the URL considerably with the inclusion of  ‘index.php’ and the post date (click on the title of any of the posts in this blog and then take a look at the address bar to see them at work), these concoctions include the post title in the URL structure and still don’t cause the blog to crash.

I have a lot of catch up to do on the latest modules of the coaching program, so I’m settling down for these “almost pretty” permalinks!