If you want to get found in the search engines then you seriously need to give thought to your permalink structure. It’s important for search rank reasons to have your keyword in the URL and your permalink is the key to that happening.

A permalink is simply the long URL for an individual page or blog post on your website. It includes your root domain followed by the names of any folders and sometimes a date or a number to give an additional identifier to a bit of information. So how should you structure the permalink?

There are various ways that are acceptable, but not all of them have good SEO benefits, or have lesser benefits overall. To get the most of your SEO from your permalink structure, I recommend the following protocol:

• Root domain with a keyword inside
• No category folder if your site is a blog; instead, go straight to the individual post title
• For a static website you’ll want to use root domain/tier 2 page/tier 3 page, but don’t go beyond tier 3 in your ranking structure
• Again, for a blog, make sure your post title has a keyword in it
• Follow the post title with a date or a number for more specific identification

Now the reasons:

Keywords help your rankings. Make sure your root domain has a keyword relevant to the domain as a whole and make sure each individual page or blog post has a keyword relevant to that section within the whole. Go beyond tier 3 in a website and the search engines have difficulty crawling. Sometimes, particularly if you’ve written to the same blog for a number of years, you’ll write about the same topic and end up with a post title that is the same or very similar. When that happens it is necessary to further identify each post with a number so that they are not confused by search engines or people. A blog post number can do that, but a date gives it a specific time period. The downside to a date can be your human readers discarding information that is old.

Keep in mind that you are the owner of your website or blog. You make the decisions. This is just a cursory look at some of the things that can influence your permalink structure. I hope it helps.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 29th, 2009 at 3:53 pm and is filed under Search Engine Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.