All Entries Tagged With: "permalink"

Is Your Permalink Structure Helping Or Hurting You?

I read a lot of blogs. One of the things that I look at when I evaluate a blog I’ve never read before is the permalink structure. I ask myself, “Why did the blogger do it this way?”

Sometimes I can ascertain a good reason. Other times I am totally clueless. If I’m not sure why the blogger chose the permalink structure they chose it’s usually either because they are so advanced that I am not aware of a particular tactic they are using or the blogger doesn’t have a good understanding of SEO and isn’t using best practices. Permalink structure does matter and if you are starting a new company blog you should seriously consider what your links and URLs will look like.

First, the definition – a permalink is the URL of a particular blog post. It includes the root domain, the folder on which your blog sits, the blog post title, and anything else you add in there to identify it. Usually, bloggers will incorporate category names, dates, and/or numerical sequencing protocol. By and large, these can be helpful or a hindrance depending on how they are incorporated.

I’d stay away from category names. They can pigeonhole your blog posts in ways that will hurt you. For instance, your blog post could end up ranking for your category name and not for anything related to your blog post itself. That would be a bad thing.

Dates can also have a detrimental effect. Human readers may look at dates in your permalink structure and disregard anything that is beyond 6 months or a year. That will hurt your credibility.

A number sequencing system can distinguish your blog posts from each other, which is good, but if you stick with that alone then you get no SEO benefits. Using these principles, I’d say your best bet for a permalink structure on your blog is like this:

root/blog folder name/blog post title/number sequence

If your blog is a standalone blog, exists on its own domain name apart from a website, then the root and blog folder name should be the same. That will make your permalinks shorter, which is good. You can also add plugins that will shorten your permalinks. One good one is SEO Slugs, which strips away small words like ‘a’, ‘the’, and ‘and’, leaving only your important words and keywords.

You want your permalinks to be as short as possible with all of the relevant information included that will give you the best and most optimal search engine ranking advantages. Otherwise, you could be shooting yourself in the foot.