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430 CHAPTER 15 STARTING TO BLOG AND BUILDING YOUR COMMUNITY If your site isn t ordered chronologically and has a flat structure, then a permalink struc ture of /archives/%postname% might be more appropriate, but be sure to keep the post titles unique! These features rely on using Apache as your web server and having a feature of Apache called mod_rewrite enabled on your site. If you don t have mod_rewrite or Apache, you can put a filename in the URL, like this: /index.php/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/ and it will still work under some circumstances. You can also set up a prefix for your category links; /topic/ is a reasonable alternative. Figure 15-26 shows some examples of the type of URIs you can generate. Figure 15-26. Search-engine-friendly URIs Contributing to Your Site s Search Engine Ranking The things you can do to help your search engine rankings are all about the content. The best and most important advice I can give you is to write well. By sticking to your subject and writing relatively short or medium-length articles that stay on topic, written in the language the community uses, you will not only keep your readers interested, but you also will gain ranking for the very keywords your readers will use in their searches. Still you should bear in mind what measures are important to the search engines: Keyword density refers to the ratio of keywords to all text on a page. A high density would indicate the bad practice of keyword stuffing is being employed. Keyword proximity refers to how close keywords are to each other. If they are too close, that would again suggest keyword stuffing is being employed. Keyword prominence refers to how close keywords are to the start of the page, indicating a measure of the keyword s importance. Inbound links are links pointing to the page from an external web site, indicating a measure of the page s popularity. Each search engine has its own recipe for what its administrators believe is the right mix ture of the keyword and link measures. However, here are a few simple guidelines that will help you with all search engine ranking algorithms: Write keywords into the