July 14th, 2010 // One Comment
This lesson focuses on getting keywords into your blog URLs, because the URL is the 2nd most important thing Google looks at for keywords when considering your rank.
WordPress Permalinks
If you have a WordPress blog, like I do, the first thing you want to do is under settings go into your permalinks and you want to change the default, which is just using numbers in your post URLs. Or change the default from this date structure which is putting a lot of folders and numbers in your URL, which is not helpful for search, and you want to use a custom structure.
When I type /%postname%/ percent slash in the custom field for permalink, that’s putting the keywords of your post title into the URL. You can also choose /%category%/%postname%/ and what that does is puts the keywords of the post after the category of the post into the URL. Either one of those would insure that you’re getting the headline of your post into the URL. So step 1 is setting up your permalink settings. Note: this changes the URLs of your existing posts, so anyone linking to them from outside your own blog will get broken links. Read my post PhotoBlog Permalink Redirect URLs Using htaccess on how to avoid this.
Then in an indidual post, the title of my post will automatically be put into the URL. You only want quality keywords in there. I remove unnecessary keyword that I’m not trying to rank for. Instead I focus on the 4-6 keywords (that I want to rank for) relating to each post. If you’re using well-named categories, that can be a benefit as well since the category keywords will show up in the URL.
Blogger URLs
Blogger accounts don’t give you full control over the URLs. But what it does do, is whatever your title of the post is, it’s going to take the first few words of that title and put it into the URL. As long as you’re using quality keywords into your post headlines those are going to make it up into the URL of the post.
Hope that helps, for more tips on blogging search engine optimization, look for my ebook Blog SEO Zen for photographers.
Christina
1 year ago
Thanks for the great wordpress tips. I’ll be changing the url structure of mine very soon!