I’ve been following James Brausch’s blog since January, when I slowly came to the realization that I could probably start ignoring the rest of the “Internet Marketing” gurus, and just follow the path James lays out. One of the first things I noticed about James’ blog was that his WordPress permalinks were set to the default, so that the individual posts appear like this:
http://www.jamesbrausch.com/?p=38
Now, all the gurus say you need to change your permalink structure so that your post title appears in the URL, like this:
http://www.JamesBrausch.com/permalinks-and-search-engine-ranking-factors.html
However, in that post James explains that it’s not laziness or ignorance that leads him to leave his permalinks “unoptimized”. Rather, it’s a conscious choice, based on the Ranking Factors data which is the foundation of many of his products.
James gets a tad testy with people who offer him advice he doesn’t agree with – see this post about someone offering him financial advice and a recent post about his permalink structure. Out of curiosity, I checked a couple of URLs with Nemeas, James’ URL and domain name ranking software. Here are the results:
With no keyword entered:
-335 http://advanced-approach.blogs.com/knee_deep/2007/04/taking_action_c.html
81 http://www.jamesbrausch.com/?p=573
For the keyword “takingaction”
-63 http://advanced-approach.blogs.com/knee_deep/2007/04/taking_action_c.html
66 http://www.jamesbrausch.com/?p=573
For the keyword “advanced-approach”
149 http://advanced-approach.blogs.com/knee_deep/2007/04/taking_action_c.html
166 http://www.jamesbrausch.com/?p=573
For the keyword “jamesbrausch”
-63 http://advanced-approach.blogs.com/knee_deep/2007/04/taking_action_c.html
343 http://www.jamesbrausch.com/?p=573
You can see the negative impact of having your keywords in the URL, except in the actual domain name (before the .com).
My recommendation? Read through James’ blog one post at a time, starting at http://www.jamesbrausch.com/?p=1. You can easily jump around in chronological order by changing the number in the URL (another advantage of the default permalink structure!). The information he gives away for free could be worth thousands of dollars, if you take action. Understand what he’s saying before you offer advice. Read this post about opinions.
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My mugshot.