Building Your Blog’s SEO Using Permalinks and Tags

One of the most unique attributes of a web blog is the use of permalinks and tags in order to build up keyword relevance, optimize your site content for search engines and ultimately increase traffic to your site. As with any site that you design, thinking about the whole picture – including optimization – is vital to its success. A blog is no different overall, but the tools that can be used to achieve this bring something new to the project.

Permalinks

In short, a permalink is the identifying unique URL to a specific blog posting. But it is not just a typical URL to be used for linking and indexing. Permalinks are used by fellow bloggers to refer to your blog – or for you to refer to theirs – in order to link to an individual and hopefully keyword/subject relevant blog posting.

Permalinks are designated at the beginning, within or at the end of a blog posting with either a text link or a symbol. It is becoming standard practice with many bloggers to use the hash or tick-tac-toe sign [#] as a way to identify the permalink to visitors.

Permalinks themselves can also be structured in a number of ways. They can consist of a string of characters to represent the post date, credit the author who wrote it, indicate the title or name of the post – even credit the domain name that the blog post originates.

The format will vary depending upon the different types of blogging software on the market. Movable Type and Typepad use http:// plus the domain name followed by the 4-digit year date, 2-digit month date and a 15-character name followed by dot-htm. WordPress uses http:// plus the 4-digit year, 2-digit month and the 2-digit date. Live Journal simply uses http:// plus the domain name followed by dot-html.

Most programs however give the user the option to change the structure of the permalink to include the name of the blog, name of the blog entry or even include the author’s name. This is important because the name of the blog can contain important keyword information that will help in search engine optimization.

A permalink is, as its name suggests, a permanent link. Meaning, even after the blog post has dropped off the main index page or main archive page at the blog site, the link will still be accessible and remain the same. Even if a post is changed or edited – or even moved to another category or area within the blog database – the permalink will remain unchanged.

Using Permalinks to Your Advantage

Most webmasters have at least a basic working knowledge of everyday SEO. Basic search engine optimization consists of utilizing keywords or key phrases combined with solid, relevant text-based content, link popularity and well-formed, compliant HTML. When it comes to SEO honesty is always the best policy as quality sites with relevant content will be rewarded and sites that cheat or use tricks to elevate their standings will ultimately be punished.

Blogs are no different than other types of sites. Traffic comes from search engines – including the “big boys” at Google, MSN, Yahoo and AOL – but also from blog engines, directories and other blog-focused listings. It is important to get a good, solid listing in order to have high quality, reliable search engine traffic to your blog site.

Because every search engine uses a different method for ranking sites you can expect to get different results within each site. Most SEO experts say that shooting for at least a top 20 ranking – top 10 preferred – based upon your topic/niche keywords yield the best results. Here are some insider-tips that will help you get the most SEO bang for your buck simply by effectively using your blog’s permalinks.

Take advantage of your blog software’s abilities to alter your permalink making sure to use as many relevant keywords to your specific blog post as possible. By adding these keywords and key phrases to your permalink URL, you will be increasing the visibility of those keywords to the engines, giving your blog and blog postings a boost.

Don’t just cram keywords into your permalink URL. Make sure to create a quality title that will a) contain solid, relevant, searchable keywords; but also b) ensure that the title is well-written as to attract clicks from real human viewers and readers of your blog.

Don’t leave off the date. If you can, be sure to include the month and the day in your blog’s permalink and not just the year. Revealing the date helps readers find fresh posts, new information and updates on your blog easily and can help them decide which link to click on in a search engine result if they are looking for timely information.

Always be search-engine friendly. Some programs like to stick a lot of variables within the permalink URL and variables do not help with SEO or help readers to understand titles and identify desirable links. Avoid lots of punctuation such as question marks, ampersand symbols and equal signs because they will affect your search engine rankings by making your links more “spider-able” to the engines.

Tags

The use of “tags” or tagging was popularized by Technorati.com, which receives “pings” or notifications from blogs as they are updated giving its users a real-time search experience of the blogosphere. Technorati not only lists new blogs as they are posted, but also gives weighted relevance by the number of links, the perceived importance of the blog as well as ranks new blogs based upon the time that they were posted.

But the coolest part of Technorati is its use of tags. Tags are basically keywords or search categories that are used to briefly – in a single word or short phrase – describe and categorize blog posts. Bloggers classify their own blogs by assigning keyword or key phrase tags to their blog posts, which are then indexed by Technorati and displayed on their tag pages.

WordPress users will be pleased to discover that Technorati uses WordPress categories as tags, automatically recognizing your self-created WordPress category names as tags. You can still add more specific keyword-focused tags to your blog posts, giving WordPress users even more ways to optimize their blogs. Categories should, of course, be chosen and named careful just as you would choose keywords or key phrases for your site description, title and keyword meta tags.

Using Tags to Your Advantage

Many of the same rules that apply to use of permalinks – or any other search engine optimization method for that matter – apply to the use of tags. Carefully chosen relevant keywords are of course preferred – and fortunately with blogs, your keyword driven text-based content should be a given.

Because YOU create the text content in your blog posts, you have a certain advantage toward attracting niche-specific traffic to your blog site. To achieve a high ranking using a certain keyword or key phrase, gear your blog postings to the subject or niche. To maintain a listing, continue to add regular blog postings that are relevant to your traffic’s interests. Here are some tips that will help you get the most out of tags on your blog.

Remember that Google, Yahoo and MSN incorporate Technorati’s tag pages into their search results giving you two to four times the optimization power just by including a simple keyword focused tag in your blog posts.

Make sure your tags are relevant. Just like with any other search optimization technique, your final rankings will ultimately depend upon the relevancy of your actual blog’s content.

Take the time to research the tags that your competitors and other like-sites are using and see what you can do to capitalize on that traffic market, and where you can look to take it one step further and get even more traffic to your blog. Taking the time to find out what works for others and investigate alternate keywords and other popular tags will pay off big time in the end.