Permalink Structure – The Key to Blog Ranking?

Wondering what the best permalinks structure for your blog is?  So did I so I did some research and found a very simple tweak that you can make in the WP admin settings area that can make a profound difference in how Google looks at your blog.

Now I am far from a blogging expert, that’s the domain of my friend Sherman Hu, but this is a simple no-brainer!

WordPress gives you several different link structure options as well as a custom option. Since they added the permilinks plug in on all new versions of WP setting up your linking structure for KW juice is a lot easier.

The different options offered in WP are typically:

• Default: http://yourdoman.com/blog/?p=123
• Day and name: http:// yourdoman.com/blog/2008/11/13/sample-post/
• Month and name: http:// yourdoman.com/blog/2008/11/sample-post/
• Numeric:  http:// yourdoman.com/blog/archives/123
• Custom Structure:

Now I am sure that they all have their advantages but if you are looking to rank with keywords in your title then the best choice is the Custom Structure option and the link structure:
/%postname%.html

When you enter “/%postname%/” in the Custom Stucture field, you will end up with links that look like:

“yoursite.com/your-post-title”

Bang, keyword rich titles without a long url string!

Plus, If you take out the dates in your permalinks and in your post design, you can have something on your site that people don’t “discount” because it’s “old.”

Making this change takes only a minute and it really can make a huge difference to how your blog pages rank according to my personal testing so far.

Ok, here are some extra tips that work hand in hand with the above technique.

1) If you tend to have longish 65 character titles, you can edit out stop words or filler words from your permalink string before you click on the publish button. This ensures that only your main keywords make it into the final url. And it keeps your overall permalink as short as possible.

2) I also like to add “/%post_id%/” to the end of my custom permalink url’s, right after the “/%postname%/” part.

This ID number helps when referencing specific posts. Plus it ensures uniqueness if ever you end up editing down the “/%postname%/” part of your permalink (like I described in point 1), to the point where 2 posts end up with the same “/%postname%/” string.

A word of caution though, if you have another link structure already in place and lots of pages on your blog, making this change will re-write the link structure of all those existing pages. This is something to think about before making the change.

But if your blog is new or only has a few dozen pages, then making the chage will be a big advantage for you long term.