Posts tagged PermaLinks

There are many factors involved with getting more traffic to your blog.  All the regular ones apply, of course like post often, use relevant terms in your post title, narrow your genre to a specific topic, and so on.  In our fast-paced world, these alone can present considerable challenges, just taking the time to do them right.  Each one of these requires us to make the right decisions for maximizing our effectiveness.

In this post, I’d like to provide a perspective on a decision you can make once – then enjoy the benefits every day.  That decision is how you configure your blog’s Permalinks.

According to Wikipedia, a Permalink, or “Permanent Link” is “a URL that points to a specific blog or forum entry after it has passed from the front page to the archives.”  This is important since links can become less stable over time as web sites evolve, merge and go away.  Permalinks are mostly associated with blogs as a way to identify individual posts.

Since the Ultimate Blogging Toolkit uses WordPress as the blogging platform of choice, references to Permalink specifics will of course relate to WordPress.  In WordPress, there are several ways you can format your Permalink, or the actual URL of your individual posts.  They give you the following format options (Settings > Permalinks):

• Default http://www.ultimatebloggingtoolkit.com/?p=123
• Day and Name http://www.ultimatebloggingtoolkit.com/2009/03/22/sample-post/
• Month and Name http://www.ultimatebloggingtoolkit.com/2009/03/sample-post/
• Numeric http://www.ultimatebloggingtoolkit.com/archives/123
• Custom

Optionally, WordPress allows you to select Categories or Tags to preface the unique part of the Permalink.

You can see that based on your decision, your individual posts will take on considerably different formats.  At last, the point of this post!  Notice the differences between the default and the formats that include names.  With the default, a sequential number is assigned, very efficiently, but not so SEO friendly.  However, the formats with names also show the post date.  That could be a bit more than us beginning bloggers want to show, just in case the day job gets in the way and we can’t post for a while.  I’ve settled on an efficient, but SEO friendly format that doesn’t open the date kimono too far.  Let’s look at a couple of other perspectives before I feel a draft.

First, a look at this from an efficiency perspective.  In Geek Ramblings by Dougal Campbell, the point is made to not use text like Categories or Tags since there is a significant performance hit due to WordPress trying to distinguish between posts and pages.  Significantly more information is stored to accommodate.  The recommendation is to start the Permalink format with a number, like Date or the Post ID.

At The SEO Blogger, they are making a sound point about the importance of getting the post’s name in the Permalink structure.  As I indicated earlier, carefully naming your blog post allows those keywords to be visible.  Again, any time you can generate more SEO juice, the better.  However, their suggestion about using Category as the initial identifier conflicts with Geek Ramblings.

Here’s my solution:

WordPress offers a Custom Structure, allowing you to design your own.  I chose:

/%post_id%/%postname%/

In this format, the unique identification number assigned by WordPress starts the string, providing for increased efficiency of storing the posts.  Then, the Post Name allows for the maximum SEO juice to be squeezed.  In my opinion, the best combination.

While I still need to make good decisions each time I title a blog posting, this is one decision that is now made and will provide benefits far into the future.

Dave