26 steps to 15k a Day - is a short guide to improving search engine rankings. While reading this article, I found a site that you may already know about called Zeal. Zeal is a community dedicated to building a better search engine. It allows people to share their favorite web sites, thereby improving search results. It looks like a terrific, collaborative web site.

Some search engines use the URI of your pages to help to index your site, so it’s important to have “search engine friendly” URIs. When your creating folders for your site, use meaningful names that will help to promote your site. Since I am using WordPress as my blogging platform, I needed to investigate how to create search engine friendly URIs or Permalinks because the default links look like this look like this http://www.crabbytalk.com/?p=31 which is rather nondescript. I found the following articles helpful:

Using Permalinks - from the WordPress Wiki

WordPress Tip on Permalink Options - be sure to read the comments, good discussion about the author’s viewpoint on permalinks and WordPress

I ended up opting to use this permalink structure /%monthnum%%day%%year%/%postname%/ which results in a URI that looks like this http://www.robinsblog.com/06152005/design-content/.

To change your link structure in your WordPress blog, click Options > Permalinks in the WordPress Administration section of your blog. There you can add the desired permalink structure. You will need to have an .htaccess file in the root of your blog that is writeable in order to complete the link changes or you will need to manually edit the .htaccess file. You can learn more about making files writeable using ftp in my WordPress tutorial.

While we’re on the subject of search engines, you should probably read this primer on the robots.txt file that search engines utilize.

For more information on search engines, visit http://searchenginewatch.com/