Many internet marketers know that adding a keyword to a URL improves the SEO potential of their website’s URL. Many choose their domain name based on extensive keyword research.
If you don’t already know this, it’s worth doing. But beyond your website, your Permalink Structure should be optimised wherever possible as well. Here are some examples:
Every page of your website should have optimisation. When you create a page, get a keyword into that title, or two if possible. If your permalink structure adds category before post name, take advantage of this and categorise your pages as well as name them.
Using a numbered Permalink Structure isn’t the best approach. If you’ve already done it, you might not want to make changes and lose existing indexing but take note of this for future websites that you build.
Permalink Structure – Blogs
Whether it’s your own blog or a free blog, using your keyword will help you. Use it in the permanent URL and in the categories, and in the title of each post. Fit the most relevant keyword somewhere and that’ll help you rank for your desired keywords.
It’s not just about a single word, it’s about relevancy too as search engines look at the URL and rank it based on its relevancy to the website. This optimisation practice could also lower your pay per click costs on sales pages as well because it’ll increase your Google quality score.
Permalink Structure – Web 2.0 Pages
Do you create Squidoo Lenses? Don’t forget to name your lens. The same goes for HubPages, too. Both of these sites offer plenty of search engine optimisation options with the ability to add tags, name photos, add subheadings, and RSS feeds but pay attention to the URL you create. It doesn’t have to be the same as your title. You should try to keyword optimise both the title and the permalink.
Permalink Structure – Profiles / Bookmarking
Do you participate on social media sites? Every post you create on these sites can generate a unique URL. Many of them will derive the URL from your bookmark name and / or your tags. Learn the Permalink Structure of your favourite social media sites and take advantage of this.
Links are your friends. They send you people traffic and search engine spider traffic. Wherever possible, get your keywords into that link name and you will see definite SEO benefits from it!
About Sean Rasmussen
Permalinks was one of the coolest things I learned when I was starting out as a brand new, newbie blogger! It’s just anther small thing, that if you get right, all helps with you getting noticed by, and climbing the pages of, the search engines! It’s also one of those things that many people have no idea about, and helps to put you ahead of the competition.
Yes Lina there is some basic parts of SEO that a lot of marketers don’t know about.
It will be well worth their while to educate themselves in this critical part of setting up an online business
That’s better. I feel that I can profit from this article.
I feel motivated to get back to Squidoo and HubPages. I have neglected them even though I joined them with great excitement.
There are so many things out there to take advantage of. I think I will just run away to a desert island for a month or so and get all my wonderful articles written and then come back and go through all of these articles and fine tune them so that they not only are gems of delight but also will have some practical and profitable use in this world of internet marketing.
Thanks for the motivation.
I have a few posts with lengthy categories and sub-categories filled with key words. I have set up my permalink structure to take advantage of them. I worry sometimes whether Google will see these as spam? What do you think?
Without seeing what you have setup, I cannot say one way or another, nor do I know exactly what Google likes and dislikes. Personally, I like to keep my categories quite short and to the point, eg. one or two words that describe the topic best.
Hi Sean,
I think getting your permalink structure is so important to your SEO efforts. It’s really a simple thing to apply and yet it will make a big difference to being found by the search engines. It’s definitely worth learning to do this correctly.
Hi Sean,
I must admit at this stage most of this article is going over my head. I understand that it’s important to have a keyword in the URL that’s relevant to the content in my blog.
It’s probably that I don’t understand what exactly Permalinks are or what a permalink structure consists of. Could you tell me, Sean?
A permalink is simply a link to an individual page/article on your site Jill, not the home page. You will notice when you click a title of one of your articles (from the home page), it will take you to that individual post and the URL will change, this is the permalink URL for that individual post.
I like my permalink structure to consist of URL/category/postname. An example URL would be http:// myblog.com/blogging/how-to-blog
Hi Sean
I didn’t really understand the impact of optimising my permalink structure until I read this article.
I need to return to my blog and check that I have followed the information here.
As it is so important to get it right, I will also look through my notes and videos in my Yotacademy Home Study.
I am not sure now about whether I have permalink structures going or not – but I need to check in light of this. I do use keywords in titles for child pages, but how relevant they are I need to check!