I'd heard about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) before, but I'd never really thought about applying it to this blog. SEO aids search engine crawlers in indexing the content on your site by offering up more information into URL's than you'd normally get using integers to call up certain posts. Before today, when you clicked on a link to comment on a post, you'd be taken to a url that looked like this:

http://unleashedcreativity.net/comments.php?post=140

To a search engine, this post reveals nothing about the contents of post #140. If someone tried to look for this post by its title, they'd have to know the exact title and hope that it was the first result that popped up when they performed a search. SEO works for bloggers by making it easier for viewers to find content.

Case in point: Now, when you want to see post #140, you'll see a link that looks like this:

http://unleashedcreativity.net/comment/140/Build_a_site_in_24_hours_Yes_says_the_
man_in_the_blogosphere.html

As a viewer, you're more likely to remember the fact that I used "blogosphere" in the title of that post than you would the fact that you were reading post #140. In the future, you'll be able to search for "Unleashed Creativity blogosphere" and find that post at the top of the list instead of whatever post featured the most occurrences of that word!

I feel bad waiting until now to mention his name, but I wouldn't have been able to get the blog up to SEO standards without some gentle prodding and help from EER. We just finished spending two and a half hours working mod_rewrite into the system, making sure that any link to a comment page was in SEO-format, devising a means for me to link to previous posts through FCKEditor, and optimizing the search-by-tags functionality. It went off very well, all things considered; we ran into a fair share of problems, but between the two of us we were able to make everything play nicely.

I'd get a bit more technical in this post, but my brain is fried and I'm about two and a half hours behind on my reading for the week. EER is waiting on the wings and will post about an as-of-yet-unknown topic in the next day or two, so stay tuned for that; provided he doesn't talk about all the work we did today, I'll be back after him to explain some of the techniques we used to revitalize UC!