What is Permalink and How Should be Your Permalink Structure?
For newbie bloggers, it becomes a little bit difficult to be familiar with the new words they meet while blogging. One of the new words they face is Permalink. In this article, I will try to describe the meaning of it and how you should set your blog’s Permalink structure to make your blog and posts Search Engine Friendly.
Permalink
Permalink is “Permanent Link” of a blog post; and that’s all it means. Whenever you publish a post, you get a permanent link for that. You can change the structure of permalink, but at the end, your post will have a permalink.
How should it be structured?
In WordPress administration panel, you’ll see a sub-menu called “Permalinks” under the Settings option. From there, you can choose the structure of your blog posts. You can choose any of the following structures for your blog posts.
1. Default: The blog posts’ Permanent Link will be like www.yourblog.com/p=123. The number next to the P is the number of your post. (First Post will be 1.)
2. Day and Name: If you choose this structure, your permanent link will show the year, month, and date of publication. The structure will look like this: http://www.yourblog.com/2009/09/11/sample-post.
3. Month and Name: Just same as the above one. Only the date will be removed from the structure.
4. Numeric: Similar to the Default one. But this will make your Permalink structure look something like this: www.yourblog.com/archives/123.
5. Custom Structure: Here you can manually choose how your Permalink structure should be like. You can modify the structure from the text box and can remove or replace date, month number, and/or year.
Which one do you Recommend?
For better optimization and making your blog more Search Engine Friendly, I always recommend you not to choose numeric permalink structure (No. 1 and 4.). You can choose any of the 3rd or 4th structure which includes the name of the post in the permalink.
Why?
So you need further clarification. Alright, no problem. Let’s imagine your blog post’s title is “How to add blog URL to Search Engines“. Now, your URL/Permalink will be like: www.yourblog.com/year/month/date/how-to-add-blog-url-to-search-engines/.
Do you see the bold words in your permalink? As the main keyword has been put in the URL/Permalink of the post, Search Engines will quickly recognize and index it. So, you should avoid numeric Permalink structure for the betterment of Search Engine Optimization of your blog.
Have your say
Do you blog? What structure would you prefer as the Permalink of your blog posts? Let us know by posting a comment using the smart form below.
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I USED NUMBER 3, IT WAS THE BEST FORMAT FOR A URL. NEVER SEEN ANY BETTER STRUCTURE FOR THIS.
thanks for pointing,
-Nhoel of http://keywordspeak.com
You're welcome. I hope you will come back again to read further posts.
[...] homepage and each post. 3. Try to make your article’s title search engine friendly. Also make the Permanent Link structure SEO-friendly. 4. Take help from webmaster tools provided by Search Engines. Recommended: Google Webmaster Tools. [...]
I use %category%%postname% formate.
From Google's search algorithm variables (http://electronicworkshop.net/seo-tips/200-seo-...) we came to know that how important the “keywords in url”.
So i think this formate http://www.yourblog.com/seo-tips/how-to-add-blog-url-t....
is better than
this formate http://www.yourblog.com/year/month/date/how-to-add-blo....
It depends on what is the topic of your blog. If yours is a news blog, then
the second one is better.
This is so great!