Create Search Engine Friendly Permalinks for Blogger

For any webmaster of a Blogger Blogspot blog good permalinks will help ensure that your traffic finds your site and is an important SEO consideration. Care needs to be taken to craft permalinks that are keyword rich and accurately describe your post. In this article I discuss how to manage the permalinks of each post to ensure you make the most of them.

What are Permalinks?
Permalinks are the permanent links to a post page. Blogger automatically generates a permalink based on the title of your post. Permalinks provide information to the viewer about the kind of content being pointed to.

Permalinks create permanent links to your Blogger posts which are indexed by search engines such as Google. Search engines use permalinks to categorise posts. Browsers use permalinks to help navigate to your posts. When you hover over a permalink in your browser you can read the post name in the status bar.

The permalink for this article is:

http://blogknowhow.blogspot.com/2009/02/improved-permalinks-for-blogger-posts

Tips for Working With Permalinks in Blogger
While other blogging software such as Wordpress allows the user to edit permalinks Blogger has no such feature. For this reason care needs to be taken when creating titles for your posts as the permalink generated from the title can't be changed later. The original permalink assigned at the point that the post is created remains the same no matter how many times you change the title of your post.

Another issue with Blogger is that it takes only the first 35-40 characters of your title to create the permalink so if you have a longer title you can run into problems. My suggestion is that you design your titles carefully if you want to avoid losing the end characters from your permalink. For instance a long title such as the one below would result in a shortened permalink which would lose the important fact that this post is related to working with Blogger:

http://blogknowhow.blogspot.com/2009/01/how-to-create-user-friendly-permalinks-for-your-blogger-posts

Fortunately there is a way around this problem. You will need to publish and then republish as I did with this post. The method involves creating a shorter title that will adequately summarise the content of your post (eg Improved Permalinks for Blogger Posts) and then publishing your post. Now go back and change the title to the one you prefer. In this case I changed the title to "How to Create User Friendly Permalinks For Your Blogger Posts." Now your title can be as long as you like. As you can see mine is longer than 40 characters. The permalink, however has remained the same even though the title has changed.

You can use this trick to create eye catching and memorable titles. It will also ensure that the permalink reflects a concise title and that unnecessary details in the permalink are removed. Creating concise permalinks is important for Search Engine Optimisation. Read more about Search Engine Optimisation in this blogs tutorial Tips for Search Engline Optimisation.

This tutorial has concentrated on crafting good permalinks as an SEO principle. It has covered ways to improve the permalinks of a Blogger blogspot blog to ensure they are keyword rich and accurately reflect the content of the post. Make sure you make the most of permalinks and see the difference in site traffic.