SEO URL Design for the Perfect Pretty Permalink

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July 10, 2008 by James
Filed under: Internet Marketing, SEO 

SEO permalinksSuccessful SEO and Internet Marketing is always in the details, so what has the design of your URL got to do with anything? A heck of a lot actually… But first I should begin by explaining what a permalink is.

Permalinks are the permanent URLs to your individual weblog posts, as well as categories and other lists of weblog postings. A permalink is what another blogger will use to refer to your article (or section), or how you might send a link to your story in an e-mail message. Because others may link to your individual postings, the URL to that article shouldn’t change. Permalinks are intended to be permanent and in a perfect world, pretty…

Perfect Pretty Permalinks

“Pretty” Permalinks is the idea that URLs are frequently visible to the people who click them, and should be designed so they make sense and not be filled with incomprehensible parameters. Some Permalinks are “editable,” meaning a user might modify the link text in their browser to navigate to another section or listing of the website. For example, this is how the default Permalink to a story might look in a default WordPress installation:

  • www.some-domain.com/?p=423

How is a user to know what “p” represents? Where did the number 423 come from?

In contrast, here is a well-structured, “Pretty” Permalink which could link to the same article, once the website is configured to modify permalinks:

  • www.some-domain.com/archives/2008/06/23/my-bologna-sandwich/

One can easily guess the Permalink includes the date of the posting, and the title, just by looking at the URL. One might also guess that hacking (editing) the URL to be /archives/2003/05/ would get a list of all the postings from May of 2003 and you’d be right.

So How Does This Affect SEO?

Putting dates into your URL’s is really only relevant if you:

  • (a) have an old (inherited?) permalink structure, and
  • (b) are providing information that is time sensitive - like news.

If you think like an SEO/IM Consultant for a moment, you understand the URL is a mini “headline” and really should entice the browser to click and visit. How enticing is it to click something that is apparently from 2003?

Today we use blogs to capture more than our daily diary - we use them for structure, for ease of use and for many other “non date based” reasons - so it makes sense to avoid designing your URL to use dates.

What About Keywords?

Since evidence suggests overly long (sub-directory riddled) URL’s are not as popular (with the search engines) as www.domain.com/keyword-phrase-phrase it makes sense to consider other alternatives.

If you’ve designed your blog categories to mirror major keyword phrases then using a URL design that appends the category and the post-name to the main domain is one such solution. It’s quite popular too at the moment although I am not currently recommending this design.

Apparently there are some issues with this approach (see wordpress for more details) and also if your post is assigned to multiple categories, you will see the “first” category in the URL and not perhaps the one you really wanted. Also, nested categories are great for managing information structure, but extended the URL too much in some cases.

I currently recommend the following URL design if you are using Wordpress:

  • www.your-domain-com/%post-id%/%post-name%

A post from my website now looks like this:

  • www.jamesburchill.com/123/some-keyword-title

How To Remap Your URL’s

Of course, the real problem is how do you change all those URL mappings so you don’t lose your search engine rankings. How do you remap the hundreds (possibly thousands) of old structure URL’s into the new cleaner more SEO/IM friendly format? How do you do this easily, automatically and painlessly? I’ll tell you next time because that’s the subject of the next post :)

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Comments

2 Responses to “SEO URL Design for the Perfect Pretty Permalink”

  1. Ari Herzog on July 11th, 2008 12:51 am

    I’ve heard this echoed before, James, and it’s a good suggestion. But Blogger apparently doesn’t allow the removal of URL dates. Wordpress does, obviously.

  2. James on July 14th, 2008 4:34 pm

    Here’s something to consider, you can change various settings when you self-host your own site. Typically there are limits set by hosting companies because they need to ensure a certain level of standardization.

    If memory serves, when I self-hosted a blogger blog I found I was able to affect numerous changes that were not possible on the blogspot host. Let me know of this works out for you.

    jb

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