In recent years, most bloggers have the awareness of implmenting pretty permalink structure in their WordPress blogs. But pretty permalink structure does not mean it is optimal. Without optimal permalink structure, it will not bring you any additional benefits you can enjoy. In this post, we’re going to look at different permalink options and which permalink structure is best to choose. Of course, there isn’t a one solution fits all cases. Definitely there are better choices you can make.
What Is Permalink?
A permalink is the permanent unique URL pointing to a specific blog post, page, archive page as well as category page. To make it simple, a permalink is the unique address that is used by your blog readers to locate your blog’s entry in web browser.
Pretty permalink is the idea to craft the URL in such a way that it make sense to all non-technical people. It is the basic of the permalink optimization process.
Permalink optimization is one of the important element in SEO. The main benefit having permalink optimized is that it helps to increase the keyword ranking in search engine results. Ultimately it will bring targeted traffic to your blogs and help you to achieve business goal.
Permalink Structure
There are several types of permalink structure that you can implement on your blogs. However each of them has pros and cons. Depending on your situation, you can choose to implement one of them.
#1 Post Number
By default, WordPress is using post number as the permalink. It’s an ugly permalink and very unfriendly to the search engines and your readers. By simply looking at the URL string, you have no clue what is this article about unless you go through the full article. Same theory applies to search engines as they are designed to behave like human.
http://www.yourdomain.com/?p=123This type of permalink is absolutely not recommended unless you do not want to rank your blog post well in search engines.
#2 Post Title
When you’re creating blog entry, WordPress allows us to specify post slug. It is identical to your post title by default. Post title (slug) is the second type of the permalink structure you’re going to into details.
http://www.yourdomain.com/your-post-title/As we can observe from the example above, post title permalink is a keyword rich URL. It’s very simple and pretty enough to give you a clue whether the information on the page is what you want before you actually open it in your browser. Same theory, search engines are using keyword rich permalink as one of the important element when they are deciding the rankings of your articles.
There is one problem with this implementation. If you have more than one article with same post title, then WordPress will automatically add a number at the end of the permalink. For example:
http://www.yourdomain.com/your-post-title-2/
http://www.yourdomain.com/your-post-title-3/It doesn’t matter to have a number at the end of the permalink because it does not affect how we and search engines interpret the relevancy of the article based on permalink.
#3 Date + Post Title
Another common permalink structure is to have date + post title.
http://www.yourdomain.com/2010/03/23/your-post-title/The date in the URL is the date of creation of the blog post. It’s unnecessary to have date in URL in most situations. It’s not a keyword that you are trying to rank for in search engine results. Many readers have a bias for new content and more likely to click on something which is newer. Furthermore, if you change your date of publication to re-post your older article, your permalink will be changed and you might lose your SEO benefits that you have in your old permalink.
So this permalink structure is not recommended unless you have a very good reason.
#4 Category + Post Title
The last common permalink structure to be discussed is category + post title. Category is considered as a keyword and this structure allows you to insert more keywords into the URL. It certainly will bring you SEO benefits. From my opinion, it’s better than date + post title.
http://www.yourdomain.com/category/your-post-title/But there are two drawbacks for this approach. First, if you assign two categories to a post, then you will have two permalinks for this article. WordPress will choose which one to show, not you.
The second disadvantage is if you plan to change the category of your blog entry, then your permalink will also be changed and potentially you may lose your SEO benefits. Of course, there are some plugins which can resolve this issue by redirecting your old permalink to new permalink but you have more work to do.
Which One Is The Optimal Permalink Structure And Why?
I strongly recommend to use post title as permalink. It’s short, simple and good enough to improve your search engine rankings. And you have less work to do when you re-structure your blog or category.
Conclusion
Post title permalink is the optimal permalink structure. As you can see from your web browser, I’m using it in this blog.
How about you? Which permalink structure you’re using and what is the reason? Do you have other permalink structures which is good to recommend? I would like to hear from you and please share with us in the comment box below.
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When talking about off-page optimization, we usually refer to inbound link building. It’s an important factor to rank your web pages high in search engine result pages. Very often, people continue to acquire inbound links without realizing there is a risk.
Today I’m going to discuss about the risks and issues of off-page over optimization.
#1 Building Link Too Fast Too Many
When we’re acquiring inbound links, it’s very easy to get them too fast too many. Link building is a tedious process and you can say it as a painful process. In order to simplify the process, many people start to use third party services to automate the process such as automated directory and article submission.
The original idea of these third party automated services is good but you need to understand how they work before you employ them as part of your optimization process. The truth is many of them do not allow you to control the number of submission per day. Some automated services submit your links and articles to all directory in one shot. This is a big big mistake and Google is going to penalize you.
The recommended daily submission rate is between 1 and 10. Today you can have the rate equal to 5 and tomorrow you can make it 10. By using this approach, you can make your link acquiring process natural. This is what search engines want.
#2 Unnatural Link Distribution
Unnatural link distribution is another issue in off-page over optimization.
Let’s look at one example. Assume you have 100 websites linking to you. But all of them also have links pointing to each other. This looks very unnatural for visitors as well as search engines. It’s like your website is included in some kind of link farm.
The recommendation is getting quality 1 way incoming links and they do not have inter-connection which can form a loop.
#3 Unnatural Anchor Text Distribution
The last risk I would like to discuss is unnatural anchor text distribution.
In point 1, I talked about mass submission of links and articles. It’s not going to give you links too fast and too many, but it will also make your anchor text unnaturally. If those service providers only allow you to have 1 anchor text for all submission. Then you need to be alert.
The natural anchor text distribution is not all your incoming links are using same anchor text. Perhaps some of them are using your brand name, some of them are using your blog post title. As a human being, everybody can insert different anchor text when they’re linking to you. So be sure to use different anchor text when you’re building inbound link from now onwards.
Conclusion
The risk of off-page over optimization is often overlooked by many webmasters. By understand the issues mentioned above, you can make sure your’re not accidentally hurting yourself by going too far with your off-site SEO efforts.
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Keyword research is the fundamental step in SEO process. I agree that it is a tedious and painful activity. But if you do not find correct keyword to target, it might waste your time and resources.
Here are 2 simple and quick ways to find traffic generating keywords for your web pages and posts.
#1 Google Search Box
Assume that you have a site related to SEO and you would like to write an article about link baiting.
So you can go to Google and type in “link baiting”. Here is the screenshot.
You can see there is a list of keywords suggested by Google. You can actually click the keywords shown in the list and go directly to the search engine result pages. For example, clicking on “link baiting ideas” will take you straight to the result page.
As you can imagine, this suggested list make your life easier to look for longtail keywords. Since longtail keywords are much easier to rank in Google, it’s a good idea to start targeting on them.
While searching for “link baiting” keyword, many people will also notice other keywords presented by Google and click on them. This makes those other keywords great terms to include in your article content.
#2 Google Related Search Terms
You need to use popular keyword for this method. For example, we can search for “seo” term. Once you’re inside search engine result page, you can go to the bottom of the search result page and find related search terms. Here is the screenshot.
Each releated keyword is link to another relevant search engine result page. It is also a good idea to target these keywords.
Conclusion
The methods mentioned above are quick and simple ways to find great keywords for your SEO purpose. But they are not all for your SEO process. You still need to go through keyword searches analysis and competition analysis before you decide which keyword to target.
Do you have any other quick and simple ways to look for great keyword? Please share with us below.
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Getting backlink juice pointing to your websites isn’t easy for all of you, more often it is a painful task. So we need to make sure the link juice is flowing properly easpecially internal linking within our websites which is under our control.
Robert Enriquez has made a blog post about link juice leakage at SEOMoz. And I feel that it’s important to share with you.
If you have serious link juice leakage, then it will affect your search engine rankings a lot. Placing the nofollow link attribute on your website is a very important SEO technique to control and fix the flow of link juice and PageRank. Today I’m going to discuss about the top 9 link juice leakage.
#1 User Function And Admin Links
Login, signup, sign in, logout, register and any admin links are just providing user function. And there is no vital information on these pages and there is no value to index them in the search engines.
#2 Logo And Header Picture Links
You should nofollow logo and header picture links as there is no anchor text unless you get customers by images (tangible products).
#3 RSS Feed Links
Most of the blogs do provide a link to readers to subscribe to their RSS feeds. Not only it will give you link juice leakage issue, it will also create duplicate content. You want search engines to index your blog post but not RSS feeds.
#4 Archive Pages
There are various form of archive pages such as tag pages, category pages and archive pages. They all contain your blog post and are considered as duplicate content. Nofollow and noindex those archive pages if you do not want them to be indexed by search engines.
#5 Contact Us And Feedback Pages
Usually this page only contains a form that needs to be filled out. So there is no need to index this page.
#6 Copyright And Privacy Pages
These pages do not contain any relevant information to your website. So they should not be indexed as well.
#7 Comment Page
As the number of comments grow, the leaking of link juice tends to be serious. You can use nofollow link and canonical link to prevent it.
#8 Home Page Link
Home button is another issue which cause link juice leaking. Since the anchor text is ‘home’, there is no point to follow the link unless you’re selling a home.
There are 2 ways to handle this. First one is to change the anchor text to your keyword other than ‘home’. Second one is simply add the nofollow attribute to your link.
#9 Read More Link
In most of the blog, you can find the ‘read more’ link in the blog’s main page. This does not contribute the link juice to your blog post because the anchor is not your targeted keyword.
You can find this issue in my blog too. Actually I plan to make the change but I haven’t taken the action due to time constaint. I’ll do it in the near future to resolve this problem.
Conclusion
You should review your website now to find out how the link juice flows from one page to another no matter it is a blog or e-commerce site. By assigning the proper flow of your link juice and PageRank, you can have a much better search engine rankings. If not, your keyword rankings on search engine result pages will be greatly affected.
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Search engine optimization is about content. The higher the quality of your web page content, the higher it will be ranked for your keywords. Without effective content optimization, your off-page optimization efforts might be wasted. The following explains top 5 tips about optimizing your web page content.
#1 Keep Your Content Fresh
Google and other search engines love fresh and unique content. It helps to separate your site from countless others in your niche. From user point of view, we want to read the most updated information. This is what search engines trying to emphasize.
Blog is a good way to produce fresh content. And one of the biggest advantage in blogging is it will update post content automatically by attracting comments. This will certainly keep your post content fresh and hot enough with better rankings given by search engines.
#2 High Text To Code Ratio
Maintaining a high text to code ratio is always preferred. Search engines are different from human. They like to index simple pages as compared to pages with lots of fancy codings such as Ajax, Flash and etc. The more is your codes, the more likely the errors will occur. And it will prevent search engines from crawling and properly interpreting your web page.
#3 Maintain Appropriate Keyword Density Percentage
Since keywords are the terms that people searching to find your web pages, it’s important to maintain appropriate keyword density percentage. In any of your web page, you should target a few keywords instead of just having one. This is where Google determine your page relevancy to a niche.
Having a low keyword density for your targeted keywords will result in low positions and having a high percentage may cause Google to think that you are stuffing keywords. For the best effect, choose 1 ~ 2 strong keyword phrases and target for 2% ratio for keyword to article length. For example, if an article is around 300 words, then it should have 6 keyword phrases.
#4 Start Strong And Finish Strong
The secret of SEO is to start strong and finish strong. This is often overlook by most of the people. You should place your main keyword phrase in the first and last paragraph of your content. The purpose is to attract the attention of your readers and relate your article to what you’re searching for.
However it doesn’t mean you can ignore the rest of your article. Sprinkle the keyword phrases throughout the remaining content will help to strengthen its SEO effectiveness.
#5 Strategic Links On Keywords
One of the effective ways to increase your search engine rankings is to embed internal links in your page content pointing to another page of your site.
For example, intead of waiting for a visitor to click to your “SEO” page, you can write a phrase like “affordable SEO” and link to your “SEO” page. This will not only bring traffic to your “SEO” page, but it also increase the search engine rankings of your “SEO” page.
Conclusion
While you’re optimizing your web page with other on-page and off-page techniques, you should not forget the importance of content optimization. With 5 technique mentioned above, content optimization gives you the best effect.
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