SEO (Search Engine Optimization) can be voodoo. In fact, nobody really knows exactly how search engines like Google and Bing index and rank their content except for the people who work for Google and Bing. But, we've got a pretty good idea!

We've designed Nimbus to "automagically" optimize for search engines. That said, auto-magicness is only so smart, so we've also given you the control to change many of the defaults in Nimbus to make the magic even more magical. Here's what you can change:

URL Structure

Search engines index keywords in your URLs. These words often are "weighted" more heavily by search engines than words in the body of your page.

You can define the "URL base" for many Nimbus sections, like the blog, blog tags, blog permalinks, blog categories, and galleries. A "URL base" is the part of the URL between the domain name and the URL for the content that is being displayed:

http://my.photosit.es/this/is/a/URLbase/URL-for-content-goes-here.html

A URL base can consist of letters, numbers, underscores (_), dashes (-) and slashes (/).

As we are describing URL structure, we'll use the example domain "my.photosit.es" - but your real domain would go in its place.

Galleries

To change the URL base to for galleries, go to Settings > View Options.

Here you can change the "Galleries" URL Base settings. Changing the "Gallery Base" will make the base URL for all galleries http://my.photosit.es/galleries/...

Permalinks

A permalink (short for permanent link) is a URL that points to a specific blog post after it has passed from the front page to the archives.

The Permalink URL structure is configurable. To edit, go to Settings > Permalinks

Here you can set the permalink post base: permalinks/{year}-{month}-foo/bar{day}

Notice you can use three variables in the post base:

• {year} - the year of the blog post
• {month} - the month of the blog post
• {day} - the day of the blog post 

Note: Don't add slashes to the beginning and end of the post base. Adding slashes will lead to double-slashes in the actual URL.

Permalinks on blog posts are configured within the blog posteditor. Simply click on the "Edit" link to alter the full permalink. The default permalink is based on the blog title. 

Pages

You can configure the URL of your pages within the page editor itself. Go to Pages >> Pages or Pages >> Add New to open the Pages editor.

Like blog posts, you can configure the URL of the page. Unlike bases, however, you can't add slashes to the URL. 

Pages have a hierarchal URL stucture. You can add a "top level" (parent) page, and the URL defined on that page will come immediately after the URL:

You can also create pages that come after http://my.photosit.es/parent/ called "Children." When editing the page, define which page is the "parent" of the page you're editing. This will be reflected in the URL structure.

Note: Parent-child relationships are reflected in the URL structure, but not in the Menu structure by default. Menu structure is defined in Settings > Navigation.

You can define the URL of the child page in the page editor. Note that the parent URL preceeds the editable child URL:

You can also create children of children. There is no limit on the number of generations that you can create:

The parent-child relationship is reflected in the Pages menu:

SEO Migration Tools

Nimbus has a full set of SEO Migration Tools, which allow you to transfer your exisitng Google rankings to your new Nimbus site. We reccommend you finish building your new Nimbus site before using the SEO Migration tools, but before pointing your DNS Settings to Nimbus.