SEO for Blogs – Harder for Other Alphabets and Scripts

Blogger.com, Joomla and other popular contemporary content management systems (CMS) provide a feature that creates URLs for each article based on the words in the title, but this works only with Latin alphabets.

So for instance, if you have an article titled "10 Top Things", and instead of an URL based on its ID in the CMS database, such as

• http://www.yoursite.org/show_article.php=23

you will get an URL such as

• http://www.yoursite.org/2007/Jan/10-top-things.html

The article's URL is one of the most important elements to the search engines and the more keywords it contains, the higher the rank of the actual article. Unfortunately, this HTML dump technique is currently non-applicable to websites using scripts other than basic Latin, because the domain names are allowed to use only English Latin characters.

For instance, for an article written in Macedonian Cyrillic, with a title „Граѓаните имаат право на избор“ (Citizens have the right of choice) you would get a generic link such as

• http://razvigormk.blogspot.com/2007/01/blog-post_16.html

because Blogger.com has no ability to include the words from the title into the URL.

One temporary solution would be to include a feature for transliteration, or converting the text written in other script into English Latin alphabet, and then using it in for the URL. For instance, the title of the above article would be "Gragjanite imaat pravo na izbor".

This SEO technique would at least help surfers who would search for Macedonian content but have no ability to write in Cyrillic at the moment, and would be especially helpful with search engines who do automatic conversion and cover both original Macedonian Cyrillic and English transliteration, such as Pogodok.