TNG -Wordpress Integration Friendly URLs?

[hillgenealogy]

If I integrate TNG into Wordpress using the TNG plugin, will the TNG pages then have friendly URLs? I use the SEO Ultimate Plugin on Wordpress, which makes urls like mydomain.com/person-name (where person-name is whatever I want it to be) on the Wordpress pages.

Will the TNG pages also have this structure instead of urls like

mydomain.com/getperson.php?personID=I55&tree=

This would be a BIG help for search engine ranking purposes.

[theKiwi]

No, I don't think so - I've just installed that plugin on my testing site and the Urls remained the same.

It did change the page title though - I've got my theme altered so that the title that TNG would use over-rides the WordPress page name. This got undone when I activated SEO Ultimate.

Roger

[Marcus Zurhorst]

I see your wish, but I guess this is anyways a bit difficult to achieve when you have larger databases. The personID is unique, but a name is at some point maybe not unique anymore.

When I look at my small database, I have already doubled names because the last name is a constant, and the given name is repeated every other generation because it was "tradition" to recycle names of an ancestor.

[hillgenealogy]

That's too bad, it would improve search engine ranking of TNG pages a bunch. While most search engines now index urls with ? and = signs in them, they do not rank them the same way. If you can get a keyword into the url, it will rank higher, sometimes as much as 5-10 pages higher if you also have good optimization on the page. And since something like 60% of readers click a link on pg 1 of the SERPS and another 38% click a link on pg 2 or 3, that can mean the difference between being found and not.

I'm not a coder, so I don't know how the redirect code to create friendly urls works, but in a standard wordpress setup, you can go into the page where you set the Permalink structure and enter something like %post_id%/%postname%/ or postname/post id, whatever order you want. Then it will use the title of the page plus the id number of the article so you get a url like "john-smith-genealogy-112/" That way if you have 1000 pages about John Smith, each one still has a unique id number so the url is still unique.

Is the way the TNG plugin works in Wordpress is it just basically putting TNG in a wrapper? Because on a site with moderately heavy traffic, that would create a big load on the server. If you have really cheap web hosting, most of them won't let you use wrappers for long if you have any traffic to speak of.

Except for integrating the login for users, it seems like it might be easier just to design templates for WP and TNG that visually look the same and just crosslink the sites in their respective menus.

[Marcus Zurhorst]

That's too bad, it would improve search engine ranking of TNG pages a bunch. While most search engines now index urls with ? and = signs in them, they do not rank them the same way. If you can get a keyword into the url, it will rank higher, sometimes as much as 5-10 pages higher if you also have good optimization on the page. And since something like 60% of readers click a link on pg 1 of the SERPS and another 38% click a link on pg 2 or 3, that can mean the difference between being found and not.

I'm not a coder, so I don't know how the redirect code to create friendly urls works, but in a standard wordpress setup, you can go into the page where you set the Permalink structure and enter something like %post_id%/%postname%/ or postname/post id, whatever order you want. Then it will use the title of the page plus the id number of the article so you get a url like "john-smith-genealogy-112/" That way if you have 1000 pages about John Smith, each one still has a unique id number so the url is still unique.

Is the way the TNG plugin works in Wordpress is it just basically putting TNG in a wrapper? Because on a site with moderately heavy traffic, that would create a big load on the server. If you have really cheap web hosting, most of them won't let you use wrappers for long if you have any traffic to speak of.

Except for integrating the login for users, it seems like it might be easier just to design templates for WP and TNG that visually look the same and just crosslink the sites in their respective menus.

Do you have a name??

The WP-TNG-plugin creates one static WP page and displays dynamic content on this single page.

I guess this is what you call "wrapper".

But as Roger already said, you have e.g. the chance to get individual TNG titles for this single WP page with small modifications to your header.php from the WP theme.

Another things that come to my mind:

1) you may have a look at the "Cees Kloosterman" method to integrate TNG and WP.

Here, it will use the full TNG meta data plus relevant things from WP, but the page is mastered by TNG.

(Even when the SEO is not perfect right now, future TNG improvements will be automatically available)

2) Instead of very individual rewrite rules for each page, maybe you can add a constant to the URLs with less modifications to TNG. E.g., that your URLs look like: yourdomain.tld/genealogy/persons/getperson.php?id=I01234 or yourdomain.tld/genealogy/families/getfamilies.php?id=F01234 or so.

(still, this is not available right now)

3) Finally, you can improve SEO by adding more content to WP, e.g. by repeating the TNG changelog in WP. Have a look at the other thread. Nate Jacobs created a plugin for this purpose.

4) If you stick to the WP-TNG plugin, please check carefully that your SEO plugin does not make things worse. Rogers finding is scary. He took effort to get the proper TNG title into WP, and I understood that the SEO plugin overwrites this change. This is dumb.

Maybe you can define exceptions, that the static WP page for the TNG content is not modified.

Regards,

Marcus

[Marcus Zurhorst]

Just another concern. You will probably not have static Urls anyways during an active research. But this is the main purpose of these rewrites.

Imagine you have "J. Roberts" in your database. Years later, you find out that the given name is "Julia". Will you now change the link to you individual because you have this new piece of information?

I don't say it is impossible, but this seems a quite complex subject.

[Nate Jacobs]

If I integrate TNG into Wordpress using the TNG plugin, will the TNG pages then have friendly URLs? I use the SEO Ultimate Plugin on Wordpress, which makes urls like mydomain.com/person-name (where person-name is whatever I want it to be) on the Wordpress pages.

Will the TNG pages also have this structure instead of urls like

mydomain.com/getperson.php?personID=I55&tree=

This would be a BIG help for search engine ranking purposes.

It is not possible to change the TNG urls to be more friendly without some serious work on the TNG side. Also, as Marcus indicates below the challenge of using names for the URL could be troubling if the name changes. The idea behind the URL is that it is an address that will not change overtime.

[semory]

It actually doesn't really matter that the urls aren't friendly. If the keyword was highly competitive then it would make a difference in terms of SEO, but there isn't much competition when it comes to individual names in a family tree. I did a search for an individual on the TNG demo site and it was page 1.