Advice on setting up "blog" area on non WP site.

[MJ]

Hey all, I have a non wordpress site I'm working on setting up a blog area for wordpress.

When setting up categories and permalink structure, what is the best route?

I intend to have a mixture of general advice, strategy, but also a lot of time sensitive stuff that might outdate like specific date ending promotions.

Anyone have any general advice on what permalink structure to use? I could also use a general "how to" guide on properly using categories/tags as this is a bit new to me for the most part I've only used Wordpress as a static site using "pages".

[Michael Martinez]

You can add categories and tags as needed. I favor keywords-in-URLs as permalinks, if that is what you're asking for.

I also favor archiving each post on its own page (which also sort of addresses the permalink question, I guess).

I recommend against publishing a full feed as spammers will reuse your content (but conventional wisdom argues that you'll get fewer subscribers with only a partial feed).

[CK]

/%category%/%postname%/

Is probably your best bet. Although if you do decide to use a related posts plugin you could get away with just the postname and have it linked within that plugin plus a "Filed Under Whatever" but I just prefer the category to be included.

[MJ]

I did set it up that way, was just curious about some time sensitive posts - do people eventually just take these outdated content pages down and 301 to some related page?

[MPC]

Personally, I wouldn't 301 a content page. I'll give you an example: If I have a page that's about a WSOP 2007 event and is no longer relevant, that page can still work at bringing in traffic to the site on WSOP related keywords. You could have a big red link at the very top of the article that says "Read the latest WSOP content" where you link to the more current related articles. That way, you actually have multiple pages working for you on WSOP keyphrases in this example. Hopefully your site is visually appealing enought that something else will catch the eye of the visitor and they may actually stick around and browse other sections. That old page can still make someone "discover" a new poker site, so I wouldn't redirect it. That's just me.

[Ozpoker]

Psychic search plug in

"Here's more relevant and possibly newer content for your search ...."

Also so if your "blog" plans to try to be recognised as a "news" site later you need a unique post id number in your permalinks as well. I got caught by that one and had to migrate a couple of hundred posts.

[MPC]

Aslo, google for the plugin called category base killer. I think you'll find this useful.

[Nat Arem]

I personally like /%postname%-%post_id%/ as my structure.

And I also agree that 301'ing an old post is not a good idea. When thinking about this stuff I try to think about what a webmaster would do with little-to-no knowledge of SEO. That helps to keep things natural. I don't think many web admins would 301 old posts.