Greetings!

This is the first post for TorontoSEOhelp.com, and I'm publishing it far sooner than anybody would normally. The site is newly created, I am just using a stock theme, and I haven't even loaded all the modules I need. In short, this site is not ready for prime time.

So why am I blogging? Because I want to do something a little different. When creating a new web site, or reworking an existing site for that matter, there are a thousand little decisions that get made along the way. Most of those decisions are not very interesting to anybody but the webmaster. But some decisions will have a lasting impact. And in particular, some decisions will have a profound impact on the site's search engine optimization, the brand identity I am trying to construct, and the marketing and sales systems I am trying to put in place.

Since I am building this site to promote myself as a marketing expert with particular experience in SEO, it occurred to me that there are businesses all over who are going through the same process and facing the same decisions. So I have decided to use the site to document exactly how I have built the site. This seems a bit thin, I know, so I will also be blogging about all the latest developments in SEO and marketing, and providing links to the best resources out there.

Here's my first useful tidbit I can pass along: SEO and URLs. A web page with a lot of key words is fine, but if the actual URL to that web page also incorporates the keywords, that's even better. So I need to configure this web page to have a useful URL.

First, if I don't do anything but publish this post, what is the post's URL? I'll save and publish this post, and let you know.

http://www.torontoseohelp.com/?q=node/2

Well, it's a start. The good news is that I have chosen a good domain name that contains two of the key words I want to target: Toronto and SEO. So every page on this site will automatically have that going for it. But the last bit, the ?q=note/2, what's that all about?

I'm developing this site on Drupal, which is one of the top web content management systems out there. There are a lot of other CMSs I could have used: WordPress, Joomla!, MovableType and so forth. But I like Drupal, I'm comfortable with it, and I want to take advantage of some of the many open source extensions available for it.

In Drupal, all content is represented in a "node". And by default, content is presented with an automatically generated URL based on the node number, and not using the English-language (or any other human-readable language for that matter). So the next question is, how can I change the URL? If you have simply set up the web site with its database but you haven't configured the site other than that, the answer is simple: you can't. Out-of-the-box Drupal doesn't allow you to set the URL for specific pages.

So what now? Well, this is a very easy thing to fix, because out-of-the-box Drupal actually has the right functionality, but it needs to be turned on first. So I need to click the "Administer" link on the left hand menu, and then click "Site building", and finally click "Modules". This will give me a complete list of the modules that are currently installed in Drupal. Note that not every module is enabled by default - probably less than half are turned on when the site is first installed.

The module we want is called "Path". I need to enable it by clicking the check box to the left of its name and then clicking the "Save configuration" button way down at the bottom of the page. Now when I go back to edit this blog post, I will find there is a new control below the text box where I am writing these words. That control is called "URL path settings", and clicking on it opens a text field. Now I can define the extension that will be used for this blog post. Note that I should not enter the entire URL: I cannot put in "http://www.torontoseohelp.com/kick-off-and-URLs". Instead, I will just put in the last bit: "kick-off-and-URLs", without the double quotes, naturally.

If I save this post and check what the URL is, what do we get? http://www.torontoseohelp.com/?q=kick-off-and-URLs

Note that there is still the ?q= code in the URL, but that's OK. That won't confuse any visitors, and it won't confuse the Google web crawlers that will catalog the content on my site. And that's what SEO is all about.

One final thing: if you click the first link I included in this post above, the one with the node reference, you'll find that it still works. Drupal is clever that way. :-)