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OK so the basic site and blog is live but we hadn’t set up the ISAPI rewrite rules so all the URLs were using the short format which did not include the relevant keywords (e.g. http://www.answerhero.co.uk/blog/?p=10).

Ideally all URLs should include the keywords you are trying to target however I have heard that over-optimising blogs can have a negative effect. It’s a difficult one to call really but we decided to go for the rewritten URLs and include all keywords in the Blog URLs (notice how I seamlessly integrated another mention of the keywords I was trying to mention there! What?).

Now again as I am not a PHP programmer nor experienced in Wordpress I got some external help with this one. I was told to add the following rules to the httpd.conf file in the C:Program FilesHeliconISAPI_Rewrite3 directory:

RewriteCond %{HTTP:Host} www.answerhero.co.uk
RewriteRule ^/blog/(?!wp-includes|wp-content|wp-admin|feed|rss|wp-rss.php)(.+)/ /blog/index.php/$1/ [I,L]
RewriteCond %{HTTP:Host} www.answerhero.co.uk
RewriteRule ^/blog/(?!wp-includes|wp-content|wp-admin|feed|rss|wp-rss.php)(.+)/(?!css|images|import|includes|js|plugins|themes|uploads|Text|wp-rss.php)(.+)/

/blog/index.php/$1/$2/ [I,L]

This seemed to have the desired effect as instead of the short form URLs mentioned above we now had http://www.answerhero.co.uk/blog/let-the-journey-begin/creating-a-basic-site-for-indexing/.
However we then noticed that whilst all the posts now had long form URLs which included the category name and post title the blog RSS feed had stopped working.
It was actually causing a 404.

Unfortunately we couldn’t get this fixed before the Spanish Grand Prix was due to start so we have had to leave it in it’s broken state for now and that’s where we are at.

I will let you know when and how we fixed it…

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