Ashish Saini from Ashfame asked me a few SEO related questions. I thought the the answers may be of interest to you.

Q 1. What is the SE issue to have a post under multiple categories? please explain in
detail.

Answer: Tagging an article with multiple tags will result in the article appearing in all the categories respectively. In the category pages, if there are to categories say category X and category Y, there will be two entries, while the content being the same. This results in duplicate content and Google pushing your content to supplementary pages eventually. Although this is not guaranteed, a consistent use of multiple tags will increase the number of duplicate content on your site which is not good. 

This is the same as listing your archive pages on the blog. You can read more about this topic here, and here.

2. For a google search of “ashfame”
it shows “do you mean ashfaque”.
How can I get rid of this?

Answer: Don’t worry about it. It’s just because it’s a name. Search for arneld and it will suggest you arnold. Since the name you searched is only present in one site, Google thinks it might be a mistake, and suggests a similar term resent in more websites or in it’s index. This happens for all non-popular terms, particularly names. One way to beat it is to have your name on many websites or as links.

Readers. if you have more inputs on the two questions, do share it. If you want to ask a question, do it here.

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Maneesh asks me a question.

My permalink structure is
“/index.php/%year%/%postname%/”
I was wondering if this would have a bearing on my seo efforts.. my site is
indexed with about 5 pages of links on google now..

This question may be of interest to other bloggers(Wordpress guys) too.

Tweaking your permalink structure is the first step to make your wordpress blog SEO friendly. Read how to do it here.  

To answer Maneesh - I see that 10 pages are indexed on Google at the moment from your site. I hope you have only 10 posts on your blog, if you have more, then there’s something wrong, since they are not indexed on Google.

Well, let me clarify something first. There are two issues here.

One - Indexing the number of pages on Google.

Two- Your permalink structure.

Answer to Indexing your pages on Google.

This has very little to do with your permalink structure. All you have to do is create a sitemap and submit it to google. You can find the instructions here.
Within a few days (according to your crawl frequency) all of your pages will be indexed on Google.

Answer to permalink structure.

Your pages appear to be in “almost” SEO friendly nature. The problem I see here is the index.php extension. You should get rid of it.

Go to your dashboard > Options > Permalinks

Select the “Custom” radio button and change the structure to this.

/%category%/%postname%/

or

/%year%/%day%/%postname%/

That should be it.

Bonus tip

If you’d like to submit a sitemap to Google, every time your content changes(new posts) just add this plugin(All in one SEO) and submit the sitemap to Google on Webmasters tool. This should take care of your indexing problems in the future.

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