Seán Hayes » Internet Marketing/SEO/Personal Branding

LaunchRock Viral Sign Up Pages

Seán Hayes — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 18:25:13 +0000

I came across this new web app for creating viral sign up pages called LaunchRock. I’d love to try it out, but in order to get an invite to the beta I need 3 people to sign up. If you’re interested please sign up using my referral link. It’s free!

Redirection WordPress Plugin

Seán Hayes — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 16:46:02 +0000

So when I first set up this blog I opted for the /archives/%post_id% permalink structure, which I liked because it was short, elegant, and used unique identifiers. I didn’t like the idea of date and slug based permalinks since they don’t use the hour, minute, and second you published your post; just the year, month, day, and title are used, none of which have to be unique. Although extremely unlikely, theoretically you could publish 2 posts with the same title on the same day and they would have the same URL, which doesn’t sit right with me.

As it turns out though, SEO calls for slug based permalinks since search engines strongly favor pages with keywords in the URL. I decided to switch to date and slug based permalinks, but what about all the numbered archive/%post_id% links that have been posted, linked, bookmarked, indexed, etc.? Well I found this great WordPress plugin called Redirection. It lets you specify URLs you want redirected and what HTTP response code (301, 302, 307, 404) to use. It also features a log of redirects and 404 errors, so you can look for common requested URLs that don’t exist and redirect them. It would be kind of hard to update a few hundred links to the new slug URLs, but for 5 posts it was very simple and just what I needed. Another great feature is, anytime you edit a post slug it automatically adds a redirection rule to the new URL.

WordPress Twitter Better Plugin

Seán Hayes — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 14:45:53 +0000

One great way I recently found to publicize new blog posts is with the Twitter Better WordPress Plugin. It serves 2 functions:

Shows your latest Twitter posts
Optionally updates your Twitter status when you save, publish, and/or edit a post, with a link to the post

It’s a really simple way to spread your URL around the internet, especially since Twitter is integrated with so many other web apps. For example, I have Twitter Better set to update my Twitter status when I publish a new post with the title and URL of the post. That new Twitter status is then used to automatically update my Facebook status with the title and URL of my new blog post, and the same can work for any other Twitter enabled web apps I use in the future.