Building Search Engine Friendly Permalinks
By Bryan Clark on Aug 8, 2007 in Uncategorized
Permalinks may seem meaningless, but believe it or not, they have a lot to do with your SEO campaign. Getting back to yesterdays tips about SEO, I didn’t mention this one because I wanted to show you how to optimize your permalinks for better search engine results placement.
As we read yesterday, SEO is all about getting your blog listed high in the search engines. Something you may not have known is that a permalink plays a significant role in this.
A permalink is the text after your URL. For example, this post’s URL will look like this… http://onemansgoal.com/82/building-search-engine-friendly-permalinks
I’ve highlighted the permalink to show you what they look like. These few words are a big key to your search engine results placement (SERP). Search engine results placement is simply how high your post ranks in the search engines.
For whatever reason, most blog software has the default permalink set to something that isn’t very search engine friendly. It’s complete randomness that looks something like this… http://onemansgoal.com/archives/p=1234 or some other odd structure like that.
There are a couple of reasons why this is completely ineffective.
- People like to know what the link is going to take them to before they click it. Which of the two permalinks structures would you be more apt to click?
- Search engines are actually rewarding good permalink structures with higher placement. There are a number of reasons for this, but the basic train of thought is that the permalink is a very abbreviated summary of your post. If you want to rank even higher in search engines you should include whatever keyword you are targeting in the title.
So now that we know a little bit about permalinks, and why the default isn’t very search engine friendly, let’s look at how we can change this.
The first step is to log in to your Wordpress administrator panel. From here we are going to click on “options”.
After clicking “options” the next step to building search engine friendly permalinks is to click the “permalinks” tab.
This will take us to the permalink customization window. From here you will see the default permalink structure is clicked. This just isn’t very search engine friendly, so we are going to change it.
From here we select “custom” and enter the permalink structure we’ve decided on. I use /%post_id%/%postname$/ but I would recommend just using the name of your post. This makes for shorter URL’s and high ranking search engine placement (or helps anyway). To use just the name of your post enter /%postname%/ in the text box. Click save and you are all done my friend! Way to go! You’ve just come a long way in increasing your chances for high search engine indexing.
For more established blogs that have lots of highly ranked search engine pages, I don’t recommend switching your permalinks without manually re-entering the old URL’s. Without doing this, the search engines would point users to a blank page.
To change this manually, first go through all of your old posts so that you can copy and paste the URL’s. Next, follow the steps above to change your permalink structure. After that, you must go through each individual post and change the “post slug” so that the URL for those specific posts, remains the same.
To re-enter your post slugs manually go to the “write” screen in your Wordpress administrator pannel. On the right side you’ll find a box that says “post slug”. Simply re-enter the old permalink in this box (exactly as before!!!). Make sure to ONLY enter the permalink… not the whole URL.
There may be programs or plug-ins that are less tedious. I’ll leave it to my readers to suggest something via comment.
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40 Comment(s)
By Bryan on Aug 8, 2007 | Reply
Comments are working again! Sorry for those of you that tried to leave a comment and it didn’t allow you to.
They are good to go now… chat away.
By Contamination on Aug 8, 2007 | Reply
Quite an informative post, good for people using wordpress.
Blogger, however, creates permalinks automatically from whatever I use in the heading.
By Matt Savage on Aug 8, 2007 | Reply
This is excellent information. Luckily, my permalinks were already setup somewhat in this fashion. Though mine seem to go like this:
url/date/post title
What are your thoughts on this type of structure, just as effective or not?
By Lillie Ammann on Aug 8, 2007 | Reply
I put off changing my Permalink structure for ages because I didn’t want to lose all the old links. Then I found a nifty plug-in: Permalink Redirect, available at http://fucoder.com/code/permalink-redirect/. I changed the Permalink structure after I installed the plug-in and immediately all old links were redirected to the new structure. One of my favorite plug-ins!
By Lynne on Aug 8, 2007 | Reply
Thanks for bringing this to my attention and making it so clear and easy to modify. One option I discovered in Wordpress while following your instructions is just below the default, “Date and name based” so mine would look something like this: http://sewingmom.com/2007/08/08/sample-post/
I feel pretty comfortable with this as it would show anyone searching how current the post is as well as the title of the post.
By Sly from Slyvisions.com on Aug 8, 2007 | Reply
Another great SEO tip. One of the most important too.
Sly from Slyvisions.com
By Agile SCM Build and Release on Aug 8, 2007 | Reply
Good tip! I’ve always like descriptive URL versus cryptic ‘?post=123′ ones. This just goes to show that a large part of SEO is really achieving the optimization goal for human consumption–make it user friendly and high SERPs will follow.
By Matt Wolfe on Aug 8, 2007 | Reply
Great idea. I had no idea that the url made that much of a difference in SEO. I’m going to change that over and use the plugin that Lillie suggested…
By Jason on Aug 8, 2007 | Reply
This is the kind of thing I wish I had known about two years ago, Bryan. This is a damngood blog.
By Bryan on Aug 8, 2007 | Reply
Contamination - Yes blogger uses search engine friendly permalinks… that’s why I didn’t mention them.
Matt - That works just fine. As long as the post title is in the permalink, your well on your way to search engine friendliness
Lillie - Fantastic find. Thanks for the info!
Lynne - That will work just fine!
Sly - Thanks. Another ProBlogger link maybe?
Agile - You are exactly right. Humans play a big part in you SERP too. What good is having highly indexed articles if nobody clicks them anyway?
Matt - I just found it out recently myself. I’m a new blogger ya know?
Jason - Thank you sir
By Nigerian Scam Baiter on Aug 8, 2007 | Reply
I suggest installing the permalink redirect plugin after doing this. Then all the old URLs redirect to the new friendly ones. There are other things too that can improve SEO for wordpress. See this article
http://blogs.thetimes.co.za/desousa/seo/complete-seo-guide-for-wordpress-blogs
By mahdi yusuf on Aug 9, 2007 | Reply
there is an easier way to do this, i just might cover it on my site!
By Vic on Aug 9, 2007 | Reply
/%category%/%postname%/
This is the best way to do it, you use the category also as keyword.
Also if the person knows that there is a category that has related post.
By OOM on Aug 9, 2007 | Reply
Had no idea about this. Feel ashamed? A little. Thanks for explaining this!
By Michael from Pro Blog Design on Aug 13, 2007 | Reply
I agree that a good permalink structure is extremely useful, for humans especially, and even for the SEs, but what about the rest of the URL? Do you think domain names have much impact then?
By JD on Aug 13, 2007 | Reply
Thank you so much for this really useful tip. I’ve been slogging through all the reader tips on the ProBlogger site; this one is a winner!
By Bryan on Aug 13, 2007 | Reply
Michael - Your domain name is not all that important to the search engines. Although it is one more chance to fit a keyword in. If your name isn’t all that relevant to your site, I wouldn’t worry about it. The permalinks seem to carry more weight.
JD - Thanks! I’m glad you stopped by to read it!
By boogiemum on Aug 15, 2007 | Reply
Thanks, I am working on getting this switched over. I got the plug-in set up but now and having issues rewriting my htaccess files.
I really appreciate the info!
By Stephen Cronin on Aug 18, 2007 | Reply
To Vic’s comment above - Be very careful about using category in your permalinks.
If you ever want to change your categories (quite likely if your blog is new) or if you accidentally post in the wrong category and want to fix this, then you will break your permalinks. Anyone linking to your post will not be able to find it.
By CHESSNOID on Aug 31, 2007 | Reply
Hi Bryan,
Thank you for this post. It was very informative and useful. I have been blogging for almost 2 months and didn’t really understand perma-links and and the nuances of why it matters till I read it here.
Cheers!
By CHESSNOID on Aug 31, 2007 | Reply
Hi Bryan,
I tried to do this but I am getting an error message:
If your .htaccess file were writable, we could do this automatically, but it isn’t so these are the mod_rewrite rules you should have in your .htaccess file. Click in the field and press CTRL + a to select all.
Can you tell me what to do? or point me in the write direction. Thanks in advance
By CHESSNOID on Sep 2, 2007 | Reply
Hi Bryan,
I was able to get the permalinks working. I appreciate your help.
Cheers!
By Bryan on Sep 3, 2007 | Reply
I’m glad Chessnoid! If I can help you out with anything else… send me an email!
By lilyruth on Sep 18, 2007 | Reply
How can I add permanent link if im using just blogspot, blogger where do I type it in what do I click? thanks you Please leave me a message at my blog in the ocmmnets section and thanks. I realy enjoyed visitn your blog I cam here through Chessnoids link.
By free wesite sumission on Feb 27, 2008 | Reply
Thank you, Bryan, for a great post. I didn’t pay attention to permalinks before. My blog is also on Wordpress. I went to check my permalinks and luckily they are formatted in the right way.
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By Deca on Mar 25, 2008 | Reply
I use Advanced Permalinks (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/advanced-permalinks/) to redirect from my old permalink structure.
By Davion | Secrets of Affiliate Marketing on Apr 21, 2008 | Reply
That’s what I normally do as well. Deep linking makes it difficult for the search engines to find and index. So the shorter it is from the main domain, ie http://www.yourdomain.com/postname is better than http://www.yourdomain.com/XXXX/YYYY/postname or some odd number.
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By Webmaster on Jun 3, 2008 | Reply
I’m using this permalink structure: /%postname%.htm for most of my blogs
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