I've been getting annoyed by a few things about this blog. First, in the last sixty days, exactly 28% of the pageviews on the site are one page - the community bitch page about Vector Security. The percentage is even higher if you include some other random pages that come up on a Google search for "vector security" and related terms.

Which brings me to the second point - Drupal's default "Clean URLs" are crap for search engine indexing.

If none of this makes sense to you, stop reading now. Go read something else, like Bad Astronomy Blog or Whatever or any of the other millions of blogs out there. Some of them are certainly talking about something that interests you.

But if you're interested in what I'm doing to help people find me, read on.

I want people to find me based on stuff I write about a lot - complaining, sports, probably some politics when we get closer to November. I appreciate the people who come here looking for Vector Security, but that's not really my focus here.

So I took some steps to become more search-engine-friendly. SEO, if you will.

First, I installed multiping. By default, Drupal isn't that good at pinging Technorati and whatnot. I think you can set it up with cron, but I don't understand cron, and don't feel like learning. Multiping takes the cron out of pinging. Now, Technorati gets updates whenever I post, and they can share my posts with the world.

Then I added trackbacks. Trackbacks are one of those things, like the Metric system, that sound like a really good idea, but depend on widespread adoption to really succeed. But I figure it can't hurt to be trackback-enabled.

And I added pathauto. Now, the link for this post (As opposed to the link to the front page) is complainthub.com/blog/drupal-seo-and-you instead of complainthub.com/node/943. This is much more informative, and I think it's much better for search engine indexing.

So we'll see how it goes. Either it will be awesome, and my traffic will go through the roof, or it will be exactly the same. Or somewhere in between. I'm betting on somewhere in between.