How to Rank Higher in Google – Creating Customized Permalinks in Blogger

What are Permalinks?

Permalinks tell a lot about the page it points to. One can read out the article name in the status bar of the browser when hovering over the permalink (by the way, permalinks are the permanent links to every post page which usually contains the title of the post). Search engines use permalinks to categorize the posts. Browsers use permalinks to navigate to remote pages.

How are they created …

Permalinks are generated automatically by your Blogging platform based on the Title of the post.

… in WordPress?

WordPress uses the whole of the title with white spaces replaced by ” – ” (hyphen) as its permalink. For instance the permalink of this post reads http://themelib.com/2009/01/how-to-rank-higher-in-google-creating-customized-permalinks-in-blogger.

WordPress also lets you edit the permalink and make it read the way we like. This feature is extremely useful when you give fancy titles to your post. Such titles which are not self explanatory does not give any idea to a search bot regarding the content of the post. In WordPress this can be edited so that, what the user reads and what the Search bot reads can be different.

… in Blogger?

Unfortunately, Blogger users are left with no option, but to accept the permalink automatically awarded to them. There is no option to customize permalinks. Blogger just takes the first few characters of the title (somewhere between 35 and 40) and makes a permalink which might be incomplete at times. For a post with the title, “The Advantages and Disadvantages of using a customized permalink every time”, the permalink will be something like http://themelib.com/2008/10/the-advantages-and-disadvantages-of/

What should I do?

Luckily we have come up with an idea to customize the permalink. The method is called “Publish and Republish method”. This is illustrated using the above example (“The advantages and disadvantages of using a customized permalink every time”)

• Since Blogger permits only 35 to 40 characters in its permalink, find a short title for the post. For instance, ‘Analysis of Customized Permalinks’ can be a short title for the same post.
• Publish the post with this short title. Now the permalink will read http://themelib.com/2008/10/analysis-of-customized-permalinks/
• Blogger does not change its permalink even if we change the title of the post in future. We exploit this limitation of Blogger here. Edit the post (Manage posts -> Edit) and change the title to ‘The Advantages and Disadvantages of using a customized permalink every time’. Now the permalink will remain same, but the post title will read the new way.

Conclusion

This trick is useful when you decide to use stylish titles. It can also be used to remove the unnecessary details from the permalink and project the necessary ones. A concise permalink is one tip for SEO (Search engine optimization).