Mike Worhach, President and CEO of Sepaton, walked into the Starbuck’s where I was meeting  Paul Gillin this morning, and said, “Every time I see you, you’re taking notes.” Confirming once again that it’s important to surround yourself with people smarter than yourself, I was having a follow-on to my meeting with Paul last week.  Paul has been amazingly generous with his time, given that he has started writing another book.  I’m eight chapters into his book from last year (2007, for those of you who are keeping track), The New Influencers, and I wanted to pick his brain on how he might be able to help one of our clients.  But I also got an added bonus, which was getting a few quick tips that could make a big difference for anyone.  Here’s one.

I know there are millions of you who already know this, but I’m offering Paul’s tip up to the billions that don’t.  It’s an easy tip to improve your Google Search rankings for your blog posts.  Up until now, I’ve been naming my blog pages numerically.  WordPress, which is what I use, automatically generates a new page number every time I write a blog post.  The format looks like this:

http://blog.waldentechnologypartners.com/?p=36.

It turns out that if you want to improve your Google Search rankings around a particular topic, you should use a different option, which I found under the WordPress “Options” menu.  That option automatically puts the blog post title into the blog post url.  That also means that the title of your blog post is important for your search rankings.  If you want to be found writing about a topic, put that topic in the title.  Seems rather obvious, I guess, but I hadn’t thought of that.

You can use a numbering system, which is what many large corporations do, but Google doesn’t do much with numbers.  Or, said differently, do you really care if you are #1 in the Google Search for “?p=36”?  If you want to be found when someone searches on something like “Virtualization,” do what  Alessandro Perilli, a top virtualization blogger does, with a post name like this:

http://www.virtualization.info/2008/01/idc-predicts-virtualized-servers-to.html

Thanks Paul.