Quick Permalink Structure Fix Improves Blog Traffic!

Ninja SEO trick!

You’re probably familiar with the wordpress permalink structure showing some sort of date on the url, right? Something like this:

Common permalink structure with the post date

If you know a little bit about SEO, you know that the first place search engines look for keywords is in the domain url. As we see in the example above, 2009/07/10 is not a keyword anybody but a horoscope writer would target.

So, how can you change that silly date insertion to a more interesting, SEO-friendly url?

Changing your Permalink Structure

A permalink is the address given to a blog post, which is an abbreviation for “permanent link”. They are permanent because unlike your main domain url, which changes as you write new posts, the url on your permalinks remain the same. Therefore their importance for SEO.

To make changes to your blog’s permalink structure, follow these instructions:

  1. Log into your admin area (blogdomain.con/wp-admin)
  2. Scroll down to Settings >> Permalinks

At that point, you’ll see some WordPress suggestions like these:

This is what WordPress suggests for permalink structure

You don’t want to use any of these. Instead, at the bottom, where you see “Custom Structure”, enter this code:

/%category%/%postname%/

Your configuration should look something like this:

This is how your permalink structure works best

What happens now?

WordPress will use the categories you determine for each post as part of the permalink url, which will include (hopefully) more relevant keywords to your url.

After you’ve finished, your permalink will look like this:

Here's the optimized permalink structure in action

The Difficult Part?

So far, all you had to do was enter a half-a-line code to your wordpress admin area. That was ridicuosly easy.

The part that actually requires some thinking is determining which Categories suit your blog best.

For that, I highly recommend an extensive keyword research.

Make sure your categories:

  • are relevant to your content,
  • have decent traffic volume,
  • are generic enough to hold more than one or two posts.

The key with categories is that they’re not TAGS, but more like umbrellas from where your tags will come out.

After a week of updating all of the permalinks, I experienced a better indexation for most of the keywords within my categories, and an overall blog traffic increase of 20-25%.

It’s definitely worth it.

Social Guerilla Marketing Long Term Battle: Building a Community

On the other side of the fence, in the offline world, regular people are being bombarded by us Social Media Guerilleros, and they’re slowly waking up to a world where the phone is a secondary tool and relationships are created and sustained online.

It’s a matter of time until our Guerilla transforms telephones into antiques.

But for offline people whose Facebook account is the ultimate experience with social media, the idea of building a community online may be a bit too much to handle.

Recently, my offline Guerilla introduced me to an offline professional to whom the phone was a fundamental tool. He had learned of my services and invited me to talk about using the internet to generate leads so he could – guess – CALL THEM.

Of course, he’s built success around this strategy and now wants to join the online world (even if it is with a offline mentality), but as our conversation goes from attraction marketing to pay-per-click to blogs, he starts to grasp the softer, more maleable side of online marketing.

I introduced him to the idea of using his knowledge and expertise to attract people to him – the Social Media Guerilla strategy, right?

Okay, maybe I didn’t introduce that to him, but I showed him infinite ways he could make his knowledge available to others and how, given the right tools, it could not only go VIRAL, but receive feedback from thousands of people that he’d NEVER be able to reach over the phone.

As I went on about content syndication, and creating a real social network, he started to realize how his social guerilla efforts would eventually lead to him becoming a knowledge provider, and people seeking him for advice.

For a second there, I think I saw him look at the phone with a sad look 😉

We settled on creating a blog, with the right tools to manage and keep a community active – autoresponder, feedburner, and active social networking profiles.

Now, he’s excited to take some time away from the phone to start producing high-quality content, and has already given me enough data to produce his first eBook.

We Could Plan For Social Media Marketing Domination, But…

He needed to understand that despite the amazing immediate benefits of taking an active role in social marketing (in his case, we’re going to blow his customers away by giving them all this content for free), building a community is a long term project.

Connie Bensen, author of the community strategist blog, writes about building a web 2.0 community – a community 2.0:

Community is a new channel for business. It offers new strategies for customer acquisition, customer satisfaction, retention, product development & the list goes on… but it takes a human touch!

Of course, as he churns out articles, reviews, and lots of data, his online market share expands. But in the long run, he’ll be solidifying his presence online and feeding a monstrous business engine, made of his own community.

I can’t wait until more offline people wake up and join the Guerilla!

Underground Guerilla: The Social Bookmarking / Backlinks Relation

Guerilleros, you’ve probably heard about the Del.iciou.s trend: bookmarking your favorite websites into online services, so you can access it from any computer, and even share them with friends.

That, my brother&sister-in-war, is a huge social media guerilla opportunity, and it’s so powerful that it’s giving Google a hard time to track.

The thing is that with the record-keeping of your favorites in a remote, public location, you’re creating a link from that platform to your website/blog.

As you already know, the more links you have pointing to your website, the more Google will enjoy you. And being friends with Google is like nuclear weapons to North Korea: it makes you untouchable.

Of course, Guerilla Marketing is not about blowing radiation on the competition, but achieving massive results under the radar, without turning spotlights on your campaign. it involves subtle moves, and social bookmarking is extremely subtle.

Boring, but subtle 😉

Stop the atomic talk and tell me: What is Social Bookmarking?

You’ll see on the bottom of this post a button that says “share/save”. Hover your mouse over it and lots of icons will popup, some of which you may recognize; those are social media platforms that will accept your bookmark entry.

Average users usually pick one of those platforms, and stick to it. The widely known Del.icious is one of the most famous social bookmarking services.

As you post your bookmarks, other users will see it, and they may go visit it as well. If they like it, they bookmark it also – get the hint?

This bookmarking cycle generates ‘buzz’, and what is the point of any guerilla marketing campaign? GO VIRAL!

But.. It’s not that easy to create viral content..

Exactly – social bookmarking alone won’t get your content to go viral or bring much traffic to your website. For that, you need to actually BE SOCIAL: make friends on Del.icious, Diig, Diigo… so you have people that pay a bit of extra attention to your bookmarks.

However, building relationships take time and can be a pain…

So why bother using social bookmarks?

Remember what I said in the beginning of this post about creating links to your website?

While you’re making friends and socializing in one network, go ahead and post your website to ANY bookmarking service available. Even though some services are less populated than a desert, they may still share some link juice.

Below is a screenshot of this very own blog, with less than a month of existence, showing the results of posting to only two or three social platforms:

Backlinks from social bookmarking alone

Backlinks from social bookmarking alone

As you see, Yahoo! Site Explorer has 8 incoming links pointing to us – and that’s from 5 platforms alone: Diigo, Facebook, FriendFeed, IceRocket, and MyBlogLog.

What are the best services?

  • Delicious
  • Diigo
  • MyBlogLog (for blogs, duh!)
  • BuddyMarks
  • SocialMedian
  • Mister Wong
  • Jumptags
  • Reddit

And those are just a few… You can use the ‘Share/Save’ button below (you BETTER USE IT!) and get some ideas of networks to use.

What If I don’t have time to bookmark in all of these services?

(lazy…)

Well, if you’re really short in time, you can use a social bookmarking software.

Even though highly effective, this technology is rather new and it’s difficult to guarantee results. The best strategy is to create  a large, active content syndication network, that will leverage your content throughout multiple social platforms.

And be sure to come back and share your results with us! Comments ARE APPRECIATED!!!!

How To Turn Guerilla Marketing Viral – The Viral Effect!

The psychology behind anything that goes viral is that the user gets some sort of benefit by promoting it.

The “viral” aspect only works if, after spreading it to their friends, that user will be seen as funny, smart, up-to-date, or valuable.

So, when thinking about new Guerilla marketing content, focus on creating remarkable pieces, that will separate those who have seen it (the cool, the smart, the savvy, the geekiest…) from those who NEED to see it (beyond your potential customers)

The Viral Effect Determines The NEED To See/Read/Try It

Therein lies the Viral Effect; divising the “have seen it” from the “need to see”. And the more remarkable your Guerilla marketing is, the bigger the “NEED TO SEE”.

You’ve probably seen a very old viral video on TV being advertised in the ‘news’ and thought to yourself:

“I’ve already seen it, those TV people are always behind…”

And of course, you’re a much cooler person because you had already seen it 😉

Alright, but how does one go about creating the viral effect in guerilla??

First of all, check through this list to make sure your content passes “guerilla quality control”:

  • Very little pitch, if pitch at all
  • There’s no way anybody will know what it relates to unless they watch/read it to the end
  • Creates expectation/suspense/thrill/curiosity
  • Goes WAY beyond “target market”, attractive to a wide range of users

If it passes all these factors, there’s a big chance you’ve got a bazooka Guerilla on your hands.

But well, it’s not like there’s an ignition button to fire up massive content syndication – specially if you don’t have a large syndication network – but here are strategies good for any marketer:

  • Most twitter users have their own blogs, but it’s also good to check alltop.com for specific blogs and contact bloggers.
  • On youtube, if you’re doing a guerilla video, it works very well to ALLOW embeds and comments. After all, you do want buzz, right?

This troublesome strategy of contacting social media personalities is the ONLY shortcut to those who do not have a large network of friends to syndicate your content.

The other strategy that seems to work (depending on budget) is to have a top-notch PR firm feed the media.

(of course, we’re talking about social media here – so don’t expect me to suggest helicopter-bombing-business-cards type of strategies here)

But turning any guerilla into a viral marketing depends on your ability to:

  • be newsworthy

  • be social (online)

(grow a large group of ‘friends’ on multiple platforms – your content syndication network)

  • be remarkable

  • be steady & keep ’em coming

(turn a single campaign into multiple posts/pieces – start a specific website/blog just for it)

We’ll keep the guerilla rolling, and will post much more content here, but if you really want to overthrow the establishment and learn underground guerilleros’ tools to automate social media marketing, click here.

Okay, Social Media & Guerilla Marketing? Yeah, Here’s How!

Hand Grenade Guerilla Marketing

The Social Media Guerilla Logo

First of all, a quick explanation on Guerilla Marketing, from the one-and-only wikipedia:

“Guerilla Marketing is an unconventional system of promotions that relies on time, energy and imagination rather than a big marketing budget.”

How about a budget of $ 0.00, and results like this, or this ?

What if I were to tell you that Social Media Guerilla elected President Obama?

The possibilities are endless, and the results are extremely tempting.

So, what does it take?

Social Guerilla Marketing Starts With Syndication

Who turns any Guerilla content Viral? You. Me. Users!

And how does any content spread on the internet?

It starts with ignition:

  • submission to social bookmarking services
  • submission to news/media rating services (Digg, Social Median)
  • a tweet

Which is all very simple; the kick comes when nobody rates, or bookmarks, or retweets your content.

For the viral effect, a key factor in the formula is Syndication.

Content Syndication is how your Guerilla content gets to the first page of Digg, which leads to several retweets, which all together creates copious amounts of traffic.

And as we know, traffic is good for two things:

  • MONEY – either selling stuff or selling space on your website to promote stuff, traffic is a major asset (when steady)
  • INCOMING LINKS – the more attractive (Viral) your content gets, more and more website owners will link to it in an attempt to enjoy some of the buzz you created. Search engines feast on incoming links, and your other content gets a nice bump on SERPs because of all that love you spread.

Okay, everybody knows that…

But how to get people to syndicate your content?

To answer a question with another:

How many friends do you have?

Just like word-of-mouth, the initiator usually tells a close friend, who tells another, and the entire chain is set.

Online, it’s all a matter of having the right friends – the more, the better.

Friends are created on social networking sites like Facebook, or MySpace (if you’re under 14). Those are great to meet and interact with people, but they are useless for marketing.

Good syndication-friends are created at services where user-voting determines the visibility and the quality of the content. We’re talking about Digg, Del.i.cious, Social Median, Reddit, etc…

The trick is not just to ‘add a friend’ but to lead attract that person to reciprocate, gaining a ‘mutual friend’ status.

This means (depending on the quality of your content) that your friend is more likely to vote positively for a content submitted by you.

So, forget about Facebook?

Why not?

From now on, your focus as an Underground Social Guerilla (USG) is to:

  • Create high-quality content
  • Create a powerful content syndication network

With the first task, there’s not much anybody can do except recommend good readings.

But for the latter, you can kick-start your syndication here

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