Optimizing Your Blog Using Custom Permalinks

Being as knowledgeable as I am about things like SEO, Permalinks, Wordpress, and such, I sometimes tend to not think of things in the same manner as those who aren’t as knowledgeable.  So it doesn’t surprise me that I never thought about the fact that some people don’t know what a permalink does, much less how to use them for search engine optimization.

A friend of mine has just recently started his own blog.  A friend that is a computer programmer (if that tells you how computer literate he is).  This friend was showing me his blog in a very excited, jumping up and down, little kid kind of way, and as I hovered over his links, I said, “You need to change your permalink structure.”  He stomped jumping almost immediately.

What?!?  What’s that?

It dawned on me right then and there that not everyone has ever heard of permalinks, even if they are as computer literate and tech savvy as my friend, the computer programmer.  So he inspired me to write a post explaining to you what permalinks are, and why you should change them for better search engine optimization.

What Are Permalinks?

This is the definition, taken straight from the wordpress.org website:

Permalinks are the permanent URLs to your individual weblog posts, as well as categories and other lists of weblog postings. A permalink is what another weblogger will use to refer to your article (or section), or how you might send a link to your story in an e-mail message. Because others may link to your individual postings, the URL to that article shouldn’t change. Permalinks are intended to be permanent (valid for a long time).

What they are saying in a nutshell is that these are the hard links someone uses to access your individual or categorized blog posts.  Even the search engines use them.

Why Should I Worry About Permalinks?

Because search engines use permalinks when indexing your blog, you shouldn’t leave them as the default style already setup in wordpress.

This default style (/index.php?p=423) is considered a dynamic url, and most search engines won’t read and index dynamic urls.  Google is only just now starting to index these dynamic urls.  And we all know that when a search engine doesn’t index your pages, you have a pretty hard time getting seen, unless you are amazing at viral marketing.

But even with viral marketing, if you use these dynamic urls, it’s alot harder for others to give people links to the specific blog post because, let’s face it, who can really remember that string of characters?

Keywords are also a good reason to worry about your permalink structure.  We have all heard that keywords are what you need to focus on to get ranked better in the search engines.  It’s true, keywords are important, and the best place to put keywords are in the title of the post.  So looking at the above default style for permalinks, where do you see any keywords that could cause you to be better place in search results?

You don’t!

Are you starting to understand why you should be worrying about what your permalinks look like?  Then you’re on the right track.

What Should My Permalinks Look Like?

There are many different options to choose from when changing your permalink format.  It’s up to what you’re interested in having just as long as it’s not a dynamic url (which means it has weird characters in it- i.e. ?=, and numbers).  When creating permalinks, you want your post title to be listed in the url, and you want to make sure your post title has the specific keywords you want that post indexed for.

Remember though, that the farther down your url the keywords for your blog post are, the farther down they will be in the search engines as well.  This is why “www.yourdomain.com” is usually higher in the search engines than “www.yourdomain.com/folder”.

The format I recommend using for your permalinks is the custom format with the post name directly after the root of your blog. For example:

www.yourdomain.com/This-is-the-post-title

Articles such as “a, an, and the” are automatically removed using this structure, which is great in SEO as well.

How Do I Change My Permalinks?

To change your permalinks, simply log into your wordpress admin panel, click Settings, and then Permalinks.

You’ll see about 4 different options to choose from.  I suggest using the custom option, and entering the code “%postname%“.  This will create a permalink structure similar to the above example.

What are your opinions on permalink formats, and how do you feel about Google’s adaptation of dynamic urls?