WordPress Blogging: What’s a Permalink & How Does It Affect My SEO?

The short and simple answer: A permalink is the direct url to a specific post on your website or blog.  This is different from your main url http://www.biculturalmom.com/.  Example:

• Post Numeral Order (WP default):  http://www.biculturalmom.com/?p=187
• Post Title: http://www.biculturalmom.com/whats-a-permalink
• Relevant Keywords: http://www.biculturalmom.com/permalink-seo-blogging-tips
• Date/Post Title: http://www.biculturalmom.com/2011/08/16/whats-a-permalink
• Category/Post Title: http://www.biculturalmom.com/blogging/whats-a-permalink

So the question is, which format will drive more search engine traffic to my blog?  The obvious answer is, the one contains more relevant keywords.  When Google and other search engines crawl content on the web, they also crawl your urls to search for keywords.  Because of this practice, having “pretty” or searchable urls is essential.  For this reason, it’s not uncommon for individuals to add categories, tags or popular keywords to their urls, instead of numerals and post titles.  If you’re interested in doing the same, you can do a bit of research while your online by paying attention to the urls at the sites that you visit and how they structure their permalinks.

Since we want our urls to be “pretty”, it helps to remove any stop words from our urls.  Words like “and”, “the”, “is” and “it” only serve to slow the crawling process and could be removed unless they’re a part of the search terms.  For example, if you’ve done some research with Google’s Keyword Tool and you’ve discovered that people are searching the phrase, “How to cook a Thanksgiving Turkey”, you’d more than likely want to use this phrase as the title for your post and for your url.  Leaving the stop words in can actually help in a case like this, because the terms are more precise.  Tens of thousands of people are searching for these specific terms and you have the exact wording, which helps your post to get a higher rank in that particular search…so why not take advantage?  Getting specific with your post titles and urls by researching popular searches on Google can bring you a lot of extra traffic.