If you’re reading this from the main site page, go ahead and click through to the article. Now look up at the url for this page. What do you see? The link looks something like this:
http://blog.oneearproductions.com/2010/07/building-a-blog-part-vi-the-importance-of-permalinks
Now, if we were using the default WordPress settings, it would actually look like this:
http://blog.oneearproductions.com/?p=316
Which version tells Google what the page is about? Bingo! You always want to use the first type of link because (assuming you picked a good post title), it tells people and search engines what your post is about.
Doing this in WordPress is easy; just go to the settings dropdown and click permalinks. You’ll see a half-dozen options; we’re using year, month, and post title, but anything works as long as it includes the title. If you want to make your own custom style, use the last option; just be sure to include %postname% in your url template.
How does this affect your SEO results? Suppose Google is indexing this page (which will happen about two minutes after I hit “publish”). First it reads the url and sees the keywords blog and permalinks. Then it reads the page and sees those same words repeated again. Bingo: Google concludes that this webpage (that is, this post) must be related to those terms, and this is a relevant result for people who want to read more about them!
If I was trying to make this page show up in the first SERP, I’d start by making the page search-engine friendly (as well as user-friendly); a relevant url is one way to do that. After that, I’d get started building links to this page from relevant websites. Notice that the link in that last sentence uses anchor text that includes the keyword (links) for the page it’s linking to; that page contains the same keyword in the url and title (and, of course, in the body of the post). At this point, Google has a really good idea what that page is about!
Remember, the whole point of search engines is to help users find the most relevant results; accurately describing the content of your pages helps them match the correct page with the correct user. While some people try to abuse the system to get as many visitors as possible to worthless spam pages in the hopes of getting advertising money, when running a legitimate site you want to attract exactly those users that are looking for the content you can provide. Why waste bandwidth (and people’s time) on users who don’t want what you’re offering? Google, of course, is always on the lookout for spam sites (and has human evaluators, as well as software, to help find them), and will happily remove them from the search results. Stick with white hat SEO; don’t let delisting happen to you!
