Picture this. You’re at a casual dinner party and you have a friendly discussion on healthy activities. The next day, your friend sends you a link to your work email address that says “Read this!”. You click it and it brings you to an article that discusses an activity that the two of you didn’t think of the other night. No problem, right?

Well, the title of the article is “Good Sex Is Good For You!” and the article link is http://www.selfhelpmagazine.com/articles/good-sex.php. Uhm, you’re at work! The title isn’t a problem but why couldn’t the link just end in with an article number like 18220.html?

That link is called a permalink. It’s the URL of an article, blog post, or any other page that’s not the home page. How does this affect bloggers? Two critical ways…

  • Permalinks should have keywords. It may not have mattered much back in the static era of 1994 but today, your posts should have keywords since they could potentially increase traffic. The right permalink format could tell web crawlers a lot about the page and most search engine algorithms grant higher rank positions for good permalinks. This very basic SEO tactic is one that every blogger should implement. Permalinks with keywords = search engine smiles.
  • Permalinks are called permalinks for a reason…they’re permanent! That means if you change a link for your post from http://freebloghelp.com/524 to http://freebloghelp.com/whos-afraid-of-outbound-links, the former still exists in search engines’ eyes even though the content had been moved to another resting place. Dead links = search engine frowns.

So what can a blogger do? Let’s start with getting it right the first time. If you’re using WordPress.org, you’re in luck. Your default post will have a permalink that looks like http://freebloghelp.com/524 so you’ll want to change the default permalink structure. Here’s one way to do it:

  1. Login to your WordPress dashboard
  2. Click on Settings on the left nav
  3. Click on Permalinks on the left sub nav
  4. Click the Custom Structure radio button under Common Settings
  5. Type /%postname%/

 

permalink1 1024x501 Permalinks are more important than you think!

Changing permalink default structure in WordPress is easy

Now you know why that article had “good sex” in the permalink!

If you’ve already started letting your blog platform name your posts, it’s still not too late to retrofit them. Check out these WordPress permalink plugins.

Dean’s Permalinks Migration – With this plugin, you can safely change your permalink structure without breaking the old links to your website,and even doesn’t hurt your google pagerank.

Search Permalink – The Search Permalink plugin redirects HTTP GET requests in the form of http://example.com/blog/?s=foo to http://example.com/blog/search/foo/ may it be from <form> submissions, manually entered URIs, or even old links pointing to search results. It uses WordPress 2.2′s built-in internal permalink interpreter.

Advanced Permalinks – Provides advanced permalink options that allow you to have multiple permalink structures and 301 redirect old permalink structures (many structures are allowed). No longer supported but still works!


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