How to Create Search Engine Friendly Permalinks for Your Blogger Posts

What are Permalinks?

Just as the name suggests, 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 viewers about the kind of content they are being pointed to.

Permalinks create permanent links to your Blogger posts which are indexed by search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Search engines use permalinks to categorise posts. Browsers use permalinks to help users 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://www.ebloggertricks.com/2010/01/improved-permalinks-for-blogger-posts

How to Improve Permalinks in Blogger

While other blogging software (e.g. Wordpress) allows the user to edit permalinks, Blogger has no such feature. For this reason you need to be careful when creating titles for your posts as the permalink generated from the title cannot be changed later. As long as your article is still only a draft you can continue to change the title as many times as you like. However, once the permalink is assigned to the post, which happens at the point the post is published, it remains the same no matter how many times you change the title of your post.

Another issue with Blogger is that it uses only the first 35-40 characters of your title to create the permalink, which means that you can run into problems if you have chosen a longer title for your post. My suggestion: 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://www.ebloggertricks.com/2010/01/how-to-create-search-engine-friendly-permalinks-for-your-blogger-posts

Fortunately, there is a way around this problem. You will have to publish and then republish your posts, just like I did with this one. The method involves creating a shorter title that will adequately summarise the content of your post (e.g. Improving 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 Search Engine Friendly Permalinks for Your Blogger Posts." This time your title can be as long as you want it to be. 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 an important part of Search Engine Optimisation. Read more articles about Search Engine Optimisation.

Good luck!