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5

URL the SEO way

Well before I try to justify the topic, let me tell you that I am no expert on SEO by far. While there are tons of articles on how one should structure the website’s URL to optimize it for Search Engine this one is on a small tweak I did to address the issue everyone faces while deciding on the URL pattern for their blog.

Also, I didn’t really find an authentic article by any search engine provider itself which details down how one should structure the URL to be search friendly. Buy I believe people are smart enough to observe the behavior of search engines over time and share their experience to help beginners like me take some advantage right from scratch. I suggest the following articles for anyone working to make their URLs search engine optimized:

Permalink

Using Permalinks

Boost Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) using Permalinks

A couple of points we try to address through the permalink/URL:

  1. Though content is the king! it’s favorable to have the URL contain the topic title the article is supposed to address. Now further down the hierarchy the description goes, lesser becomes the likelihood for it to feature in the top search results. So for blogs focusing on a specific category, it’s ideal to have the domain name itself describing the broader topic followed by specific article description. From my understanding so far, the hierarchy is determined the number of slashes ‘/’ before the description comes in.

So ‘www.yourdomain.com/article-title’ is more search engine friendly than ‘www.yourdomain.com/topics/category/article-title’.

  1. Though ‘www.yourdomain.com/article-title’ format is more optimized for search engines, it poses two concerns:
    1. It robs you of any kind of meaningful structuring of content.
    2. You can’t have duplicate article titles. If I blog for 20 years, I may very well have duplicate article titles.

What #b. can be addressed with a little caution, one still needs to have some kind of structuring in place.

Based on personal preferences people have come up with some kind of trade offs between structuring and search engine friendliness. The following are some examples (Since I use WordPress, the examples correspond to that, but the idea is same for any blogging platform):

Greater structuring and lesser SEO:

  • www.yourdomain.com/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/
  • www.yourdomain.com/topics/%category%/%postname%/

Greater SEO and lesser structuring:

  • www.yourdomain.com/%postname%/

I have a basic question. If the ‘/’ is the culprit and makes the URL search un-friendly, who stops you from using something like:

  • www.yourdomain.com/year-month-day-postname

The post you are reading has the following URL

And here’s how it is done in WordPress using a custom permalink specification:

  • /%year%-%monthnum%-%day%-%postname%/

Now isn’t that simple? And it gives you the best of both worlds I guess. I am still looking for any gotchas as I haven’t yet found a blog with such a URL pattern, which I think is quite obvious. If you see one (either a gotcha or a site), please let me know.

Till then I’ll be happy that I’ve discovered something unique 😉

And before I forget to mention, all this is just a logical representation of the content/posts and has nothing to do with the actual structuring of the content, so it can be changed at will without bothering about the content. But but but….migration from one structure to the other is painful without hampering the credibility the links would have earned. So it’s best to decide the URL pattern right from the word go!

1

Market Sentiments

Date: Wednesday, 17th October 2007

Time: Around 10:30 AM

I logged into my trading account to view my portfolio. Couldn’t believe what I saw! My portfolio (though it’s meager) was down 20% from what it was last night. I looked at the market flash only to know that the trading had been halted for an hour as the Sensex shed around 1500 points within minutes of opening, thereby ripping through the lower circuit. I was not able to figure out what was going on.

Anyway all that passed away like a dream and things were back to normal the very same day, once the markets reopened.

But why the hell did this happen?

Well by now everyone knows that it was because of SEBI’s proposed ban on P Notes with immediate effect. I interacted with people around me who had some interest in the markets, and everyone suggested to stay away from active investing as the markets are volatile because of SEBI’s recent proposal on P Notes.

So far so good, the moment I asked what a P Note is, I got blank faces or some weird explanation which I couldn’t comprehend.

To be precise, a P Note (Participatory Note) is a financial instrument through which a foreign individual or institution can take a position in the Indian equity market without being registered as a ‘Foreign Institutional Investor’ (FII). So the FIIs who are already registered in India become the medium for such individuals/institutions to take a pie in India’s promising growth story by issuing them P Notes.

So what’s wrong?

Well if the money flowing in through such instruments becomes significant; it can make any regulator uncomfortable, as it becomes impossible to track as to where the money is coming from. I am not going to explain any further. If you would like you know more the following could be helpful:

What are P Notes?

The point I want to make is not the whole P Note issue. I wanted to highlight the significance of the all powerful ‘Market Sentiment’. I have read a number of times that the Market Sentiment is so powerful that it can sometimes defy all logic. I believe that in any market there are only a few people (few in nos. but holding the major chunk of the market.) who understand the intricacies of it and a majority are mere dummy observers.

Let me summarize what I learnt from the P Note episode:

  1. Any news reaches the market as and when it happens.
  2. The markets react to the news almost instantly.
  3. We may be able to predict the direction (+ve or -ve) of the index based on the news but the magnitude of swing can be completely disproportional to the actual impact the news may have.
  4. Over the time, the markets digest the news and indexes get back to their normal, leaving behind the appropriate impact the news should have made.

All this provides some decent opportunities for a well informed investor, to buy/sell stocks and make a quick gain.

Happy investing 🙂

3

Hello world!

Welcome to iLog. I didn’t spend a lot of time thinking what I should call my blog as, so that’s the best I could come up with. iLog could mean:

  1. I (My) Log
  2. I (Internet) Log

So I combine the two and say “My Internet Log”. I know that doesn’t sound cool!, but that’s what it is.

After spending a week deciding on the structuring, layout, themes etc., finally, I got everything in place to put up my first post. Now I can pour in all the crap that comes to my mind. I am pretty unorganized by nature, but I’ll try to categorize my posts properly. I am wondering how many categories I am gonna end up with!

While I am starting all this in anticipation that people would come up to read my posts and provide comments, even if that doesn’t happen I would be happy to continue. Once in a while, as life moves on, it would be great to browse through my own posts to remember the past and see how things have changed in and around me.

Before I complete this, let me thank Ankit Solanki for helping me with the setup and being generous to provide space to host my blog.

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