This is day 7 of my 30 day marketing challenge. Today’s ideas come mostly from John Reese’s article here.

1. I adjusted my link structure to be a simpler format: “/postTitle/” instead of what it was “/year/month/day/postTitle/”. Supposedly this will help search engines pull keywords out of the links by making them shorter and the directory structure smaller. I used this plugin to make sure I don’t break any links in the transition.

2. I added a big list of “update services”. Updated services are websites that get notified (pinged) each time you make a post on the blog. Here are the ones I added:

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/

http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping

http://api.moreover.com/ping

http://api.feedster.com/ping

http://api.moreover.com/RPC2

http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2

http://www.bitacoles.net/ping.php

http://blogdb.jp/xmlrpc

http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2

http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates

http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php

http://www.blogsnow.com/ping

http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC

http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc

http://ping.bitacoras.com/

http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/

http://ping.feedburner.com/

http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php

http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php

http://rcs.datashed.net/RPC2

http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/

http://topicexchange.com/RPC2

http://www.weblogues.com/RPC/

http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/

http://xmlrpc.blogg.de/

http://thingamablog.sourceforge.net/ping.php

http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2

3. I submitted the site to MyBlogLog and tagged it with the right keywords. This (in theory) allows a community to develop around your blog where people will say they like your blog and will share it with others. I don’t know much about it but it was recommended. It comes with a little snippet of code you can use on your website that shows who has viewed the site recently. I couldn’t format it correctly on my site so I removed it. Hopefully it can still be used without the snippet of code installed (this is what I assume, but can’t say for sure).

I wanted to also try changing the hyphens in my link structure to underscores too, but was unable to find a way to do this.