For this I used the plugin Redirection by John Godley. If you place all your posts into carefully selected categories which contain important keywords for that subject, you can set the Permalinks (through Settings) to include the category name in the web url, ie:
/%category%/%postname%.html
or
/%category%/%postname%/
in the Custom Structure on the Permalinks page. This is primarily beneficial if you have many posts covering a broad range of topics and want to focus the topics according to certain keywords. The redirection itself is important so that you can instruct google of where the new pages are. In about a month google will percolate the changes and transfer all page rank and rankings to the new page, otherwise this very important SEO stuff will get lost, to a large degree.
The procedure how to redirect is as follows.
Install the plugin XML-Sitemap. This is also very important for SEO.
Once you create your sitemap, after installing the plugin, download sitemap.xlm from your website and open it in Word.
In XML Data Views choose sitemap.xsl. This should convert the format into a table, with the links on the far left column. Select that column, copy it, erase the entire contents of the file and paste it back in Text Only mode. Save the file as txt format, open it in Notepad and copy its contents into the far left column of a blank Excel file. It should be one per line.
Now update your Permalinks to include the Category name (make sure all your posts are first assigned to the correct category).
Download the sitemap.xlm again and this time it should have the new addresses. Do the same for the second column. Make sure the post addresses are lined up correctly (old site left column, new site second column but with category name in the url address).
If this process will be taking too long and you are afraid your dead and unredirected (old) pages will cause you harm in the eyes of google, you can simply remove
/%category%
from the Permalinks structure and put it back once everything is set up properly.
Now save your Excel file as (Windows) comma delimited CSV format. Before you upload this big file, I would suggest you open the csv file and erase all but one line, so that you can test it first (save it with another name so as not to lose all your data). It should look like (when viewing in Word or Notepad)
old_page, new_page
Now go to Tools > Redirection > Options and upload your test file in the Import section.
Once done, copy the old web address, paste it into your browser and test if it in fact does redirect. If it has worked successfully then you can upload the whole list/file.
More SEO Tips concerning this matter (instructions to customer)
took me a few hours to figure out how to do it but successfully redirected all the old pages. You can test it by removing the category name from the url/page address and see that it redirects automatically to the new one.
Attached you will find your new list of files. I noticed that you have a lot of files similar to:
http://onwardtoourpast.com/genealogy_blog/todays-tip-for-the-real-world-genealogist-120.html
http://onwardtoourpast.com/genealogy_blog/todays-tip-for-the-real-world-genealogist-122.html
http://onwardtoourpast.com/genealogy_blog/todays-tip-for-the-real-world-genealogist-124.html
http://onwardtoourpast.com/genealogy_blog/todays-tip-for-the-real-world-genealogist-125.html
http://onwardtoourpast.com/genealogy_blog/todays-tip-for-the-real-world-genealogist-126.html
This is not good because google considers it spammy and downgrades them. If you are looking for ideas how to title a blog you can look at the Tags section in the editing window. It is a good idea to add all the tags, because that is the new thing with google and it might not be paying attention to the Meta Keywords anymore. Or if you want a more detailed report of the most common words used on one of your pages, you can use that SEO Quake plugin I suggested to you a while ago.
All pages should have a unique title, preferably based on the most frequent words on the page, and the Description and Keywords should use the same words, but the Description should be a bit different, so make sure to add a few more words. This combination will have the greatest affect for raising your rankings of that page in those keywords.
If you add any pictures, it is a good idea to use the Title in the picture’s Alternate Text (with each successive picture using slightly different alternate text – I usually just add a number, or add the name of the picture file), which you will find in the window once you select which picture to upload from your computer. Don’t forget that you can embed pictures into the text, such as on the right or left side. Right now you have it in the center and the text does not wrap around it.
If you decide to change the titles of those repetitive pages first wait for my additional instructions.
Now we can proceed to an import step: go to Setting > SEO Smart Links. It’s pretty straight forward, and this system creates automatic links between your pages just like wikipedia does. Wiki is often the first page on the net and this is one of the main reasons for that. Whenever I play around with WP I have the admin account open in one tab, and the online version in another tab. In Chrome you can ctrl pageup or pagedown to bounce between tabs. In other browsers it might be ctrl tab or ctrl shift tab. You update a page, jump to its online version and press F5 (refresh) to see the changes.
To create a list at the bottom of this plugin, first start with one page and test it. For example, every time the word Czech Republic is mentioned in an article, the plugin can be set to create a link to your page/post specialising on that. Once you see how it works you can create your list. You can also do the same for external/third party pages. Google likes it when your pages occasionally do that, as opposed to just interlinking with your own pages, which it would consider a deadend site. I often link out to wiki pages because they are stable and well respected by google. If making such manual linkouts make sure to use one of the keywords you are focusing on with that page.
And when linking to some of your pages from third party sites, which is very important (it’s like a vote for your site and gives it more credit in google’s eyes), you can use the attached file as a guide. For myself I always wrote the Title of the page in the column to the left so that I know what keywords I’d like to link from.
I know that you think the situation has now changed and that it is bad to link back to your site, but I am sure the world of SEO experts have not been fired and they are still busy building backlinks, just being more careful about it. This is a very important part of ranking up in google, but it’s obviously your choice. What I do is if I read some website where I notice I can post a comment on the bottom, and I see that other comments were allowed to link out to their website (or from their name – try to add “Geneology expert” or other important keyword to your name if so), I try to think of a good comment, after understanding the article, so that the moderator will be likely to accept it.
If using the plugin to automatically link to your pages, try to link to only important or interesting articles, to give your reader a good experience and keep them around.
Okay, should take about a month for your new pages to get indexed properly in google, after which I can uninstall the plugin.
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Tags: WordPress, Comma-separated values, Permalink, PageRank, Redirection, XML