Search Engine Friendly Permalink Blog Structure
Optimizing your blog’s permalink structure is very important to make sure you receive a high click through ratio from search engine results. If you use WordPress as your blogging platform, then you know there are many different ways to structure your permalinks. Most bloggers use the default setup of having their URL shown as moneymakingscoop.com/blog/?p=123, where ?p=123 is the permalink code. Another popular choice is to use the year/month/date/post-title format: moneymakingscoop.com/blog/2007/11/13/sample-post. Up until recently I was using this method, as I thought readers would like to know when the post was originally made.
Lynn Terry from ClickNewz.com held a free webinar yesterday on her site and explained the difference in using a particular permalink structure over the other. She recommends using the /%post_id%/%postname%/ format. An example of how the URL would look is moneymakingscoop.com/blog/123/sample-post, without any date given. Lynn explains that using this structure does not make your posts look ‘dated’ while found within search engine results. If you have a great article where the information may still be relevant, but a reader sees it was originally posted in 2005, they may not want to click on it. This format is also easier to link to your posts, especially in an e-mail or while speaking in person to a colleague. If you want to make reference to a specific post, you don’t have to ramble off the complete URL with the post title in it. Using the /%post_id%/%postname%/ format, you can simply link to moneymakingscoop.com/blog/%post_id%, which is the same as moneymakingscoop.com/blog/123 – completely removing the post title from the equation.
Let’s say you’ve been using the /%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/ structure for months and all of your indexed pages in Google link to that particular address, not to mention other sites. There’s a simple way to forward this to your new permalinks. You can edit your .htaccess file or create a 301 redirect on your own. OR, you can use a simple WordPress plugin that I currently run called Permalink Redirect.
To change your permalinks, click “Options” in WordPress followed by “Permalinks”. If you need to create a permalink redirect, you’ll see while using the plugin I suggested that it’s very to do and should take you about 5 seconds. There are two boxes available to you – one to specify the old permalink structure and another to specify the new one.
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