Travis Roberts

After reading Colin's excellent post on search engine optimization, I decided that my personal blog could use a little fine-tuning to hopefully index it a little higher in search results.

Google, at least, will rank each page it indexes based on several criteria. The mains ones being the actual URL of the page, the page title, and how the content of the page relates to both. Since I built my blog using Ruby on Rails, it was easy to customize the URL based on each blog entry. If you click on the title of a post, for example "Search engine optimization", you will be taken to a URL that looks like this:

http://www.travisonrails.com/2006/09/07/Search_engine_optimization

The title of the blog post now becomes the URL of the page. This definitely helped my search ranking, but my page title remained the boring "Travis on Rails" no matter what page you were on. So, I recently decided to change the page title to reflect the title of the post as well. Thanks to Rails, in one line of code and less than five minutes time I now had page titles that echoed my post titles. So now if you go to a post titled "Search engine optimization", you'll see the URL from earlier as well as the new page title "Travis on Rails - Search engine optimization". So the title of the post will appear three times for each page: the page title, the URL, and in the content of the page. This should definitely boost each individual page's search ranking.