Improve Search Engine Rankings by Using a Simple Tool

This post is part of our monthly segment called “Technology Meeting Wrap Up.” Every month, the whole office meets to discuss fun, useful, helpful, new (or any combination of these adjectives) tools and technology. This segment discusses one bit of technology we discussed at our meeting.

Everyone’s interested in the good ol’ acronym that is one of those web buzz words, SEO. If we were playing the word association game, in a lightening round, you say “SEO” and I say “Search Engine Optimization.” Others might reply, “Better Google rankings,” “That thing I should do to my site that I know nothing about,” and still others, “Sarah Eats Oranges.” Ignore those last people.

So you may not be an SEO expert (I certainly am not), as knowing SEO requires a lot of studying and tech geek know how. Thankfully, though, we have people at Demi & Cooper who fancy themselves experts, knowledgeable on how to best work your website and blog to get the best possible rankings in search engines. Also thankfully, tools exist that can help you out with the process.

One thing that counts in search engine rankings is the URL. You want important words that people may search as part of the URL. You also want less important words removed. This way your URL is short, and each keyword included in the URL makes up a higher “percentage” of the URL, giving the words more weight in a search.

Enter the WordPress plug in SEO Slugs. At our most recent technology meeting, Luke introduced us to this handy tool that automatically improves your blog post’s URL by removing unimportant words so only the best keywords remain.

Without SEO Slugs, in WordPress blogs, the title of your posts is automatically translated to the URL for the post. So, for example, this blog is built with WordPress. I titled the post “Improve Search Engine Rankings by Using a Simple Tool” The URL WordPress automatically assigns to this post is:

http://demicooper.com/blog/2010/04/15/improve-search-engine-rankings-by-using-a-simple-tool

When I hit save or publish, the plug in retitles the post:

http://demicooper.com/blog/2010/04/15/improve-search-engine-rankings-simple-tool

SEO Slugs removed the smaller, unimportant words “by,” “using,” and “a,” which will make the other words more powerful if someone searched any combination of the other words. The URL is changed either when you save or publish the post.

If you don’t trust this autosave to give you the best URL every time, or if you have particular keywords in mind that you’d like to use, you can still edit the URL if you choose to after. This tool just saves you the step of having to edit it to remove unimportant words on every post. You can download SEO Slugs here.