Permalink Structure Does It Really Matter?

Writing by Brick Marketing Staff on Monday, 10 of September , 2007 at 9:54 am

If you are using wordpress or typepad and hosting your own blog, you have a choice of different link structures. You need to have access to your .htaccess file to make permalink changes in most cases. If the htaccess file is writeable, you can do everything from the wordpress admin area.

Permalinks are the full urls to each blog post. Click the headline of this post and it will take you to a new page with just this post on it. Look at the address in your browser’s address bar. That is the permalink to this post.

Here are some choices that are built into wordpress for your permalink structure.

http://blogmarketingjournal.com/?p=123

That is the default permalink structure for wordpress. Search engines ignore everything after the question mark. Plus there is nothing after the question mark that would help you with seo anyway. I do not recommend leaving the default permalink structure for your blog.

http://blogmarketingjournal.com/2007/09/09/sample-post/

This permalink structure has no question marks or special characters that might inhibit the search engines from reading the full url. sample-post is there in place of your blog post headline. I use this permalink structure, so the url for this post ends with permalink-structure-does-it-really-matter.

If you use good keywords in your headlines, you end up naming files with those keywords. It has some seo benefit. The date keeps me from duplicating headlines. When this blog is a few years old and my alzheimers gets worse, I might end up headlining a post with the exact same phrase I have used some time in the past. The date portion of the permalink structure above keeps that from becoming a duplicate post title or url.

http://blogmarketingjournal.com/archives/123

Again, nothing to keep the search engine from reading the full url, but it doesn’t say anything to the user and doesn’t really have any benefit from an seo standpoint.

Last, but not least, you can create a custom permalink structure. You may want the headline to be the end of the url, but you might like a particular word or phrase to always be in the url, such as;

http://blogmarketingjournal.com/blogging-tips/2007/09/09/sample-post/

I’d like to see some other custom permalink structures some of you use, so join in and post if you use a custom permalink structure.

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                      Category: Blogging Tips                      

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