Comments on: Optimizing WordPress Permalinks Effectively

By: Wesley LeFebvre

Wesley LeFebvre — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 00:11:33 +0000

Hey Gil,
I’m glad you found tip #2 helpful!

Also, sorry, but I don’t have blogspot blogs so I can’t help you there….

By: Gil Pauley

Gil Pauley — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 21:04:06 +0000

Wesley,

Great article. On our two blogs, I almost have it correct. LOL. As for SEO Tip 1 – my WordPress blog is set up correctly, except I have always hated the very long “pretty URLs” that the %postname% created. It often cut off the part I really wanted to be seen. I was completely unaware of that little EDIT button under SEO Tip 2, but I will use it in the future with the WordPress blog.

I also have a Blogspot blog and I can’t find the “permalinks” under “settings”?? to make the change. Right now it uses the year and month before the title;
http://bellevuedentist-cosmetic.blogspot.com/2011/01/dr-cynthia-pauley-selected-to.html is an example. This one also cut off the “usaTopdentists” which was in the title, so two problems here. Any thoughts on where the “permalinks” are in the Blogspot dashboard??

Thanks in advance for your help.

By: Wesley LeFebvre

Wesley LeFebvre — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 15:38:21 +0000

Hi Dan,
If it was me, I’d remove the “nannys”, because for the post you shouldn’t be trying to rank for “san diego nannys”, but rather “how to be a great nanny in san diego”.

By: Dan

Dan — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 01:49:01 +0000

I have been back and forth on this. I will try to make an example that is congruent with my situation (as I am sick of coming up in google results for comments etc)
I only have about 6 posts so far.

Say my domain is:
bettyschildcaresandiego.com I have a blog section and my permalinks were set to : /%category%/%postname%/ and I had the category called “blog” so it looked like:
bettyschildcaresandiego.com/blog/how-to-be-a-great-nanny-in-san-diego

I recently changed my category name from “blog” to “nannys-blog” to get that keyword in there.

So in my case would I still want to get rid of the category and just use %postname% or should I keep the category since it gets one of my main keywords (nanny) into the url.

Assume my main search phrase I am targeting is “san diego nannys”

By: Wesley LeFebvre

Wesley LeFebvre — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 17:25:47 +0000

Hi Subrato,
By using Tip #2 you can append the date to the URL without having it show in heading of the post. That way you can still use the same exact post name over and over without displaying the date in the post name. Just an FYI.

best,

By: Subrato Paul

Subrato Paul — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 14:21:28 +0000

I have started my self-hosted WordPress blog only this month.
I am already using your Tip 1, only post name.
http://www.goldentwine.com/blog/twitter-goofs-2010325
Here, I have appended the date as I am going to use the same title for more goof stories.
But I neglected the second tip which is very useful. Thanks for the same. From now on, I am going to edit my post name dropping all unnecessary words.

By: Wesley LeFebvre

Wesley LeFebvre — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 23:27:40 +0000

Hey OMA, I read your blog post.

I prefer it without the extension for this blog. But I definitely know of cases where I’d prefer it with the extension. For me the difference between the two on a particular site is mostly personal preference.

Thanks for sharing!

ADDED: Also, just to note. I don’t think it really makes a difference. If you check out the three most popular SEO sites (seachengineland, seobook, seomoz), none of them use filename extensions on their blog posts. Nor does Danny Sullivan on his personal blog….

By: OMA

OMA — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 23:05:49 +0000

This is a great tip for those who are running wordpress. I would also recommend using this plugin http://www.onlinemarketingadvisors.com/wordpress-html-file-extensions.html, I use it on my site and it works great.

Having keyword friendly permalinks is good, but having keyword friendly permalinks with a solid file extension is even better. Having your page names end in .html or php is alot better for search engine rankings than leaving it blank.