July 30, 2009

How to do a good blog Step 2: URL structure

This is my second post in a series on how to do a good, and effective blog.  Much of this series will be focusing on the SEO aspects of blogging.  Obviously there are many other reasons than SEO to blog.  Rather that reiterate them in each step in the series, please feel free to take a look at:

How to do a Good blog Step 1

which touches on several reasons to blog, and also focuses on choice of the domain name for your blog.

In this post I want to focus on what is perhaps the most common problem that I see companies make on their blogs, and even on their websites in general: URL structure.

Let me make the point on URL structure in this way:  Have a look at the URL below, and tell me what this article is likely about:

http://mycompany.com/?p=123

Have no idea?  Neither does anyone else.  Neither does Google.

How about this one:

http://www.myblog.com/recipes/?p=123

Well, it’s probably some sort of recipe.  But I seldom Google for “recipe.”  I would be much more likely to Google “Desert recipes”, or even more likely “Pecan pie recipe.”

So why do so many people keep this level of information from one of the most powerful SEO drivers on their site: the URL?  If you’re running a blog this is pretty easy to fix.  On wordpress specifically click on “Settings”, then “Permalinks.”  This will open up a screen that allows you to change you URL structure.

Here’s a hint for you: The “Default” setting is the worst one.  I would choose one of the settings that have “sample-post” in them.  This alone should help your “Google Juice” a ton.

This step makes it so that the subject of your post is now par of the URL.  But that’s just one step.  Now you must be sure to use phrases that people use to search for your product or services in your subjects.  Don’t have a subject like “Recipe of the day for Thursday”, when it is so much better to say “Amazing pecan pie recipe.”

All of this also holds true in your website.  If you have URLs that remain the same as the site is navigated, or show meaningless variables and numbers, then you are holding yourself back.

One thing I have commonly seen is companies who work with an agency, using that agency’s CMS, and are told that URL structure is meaningless.  I am stunned at how much I encounter this.  I cannot say this strongly enough: If your agency is telling you that URL structure is not important, they are knowingly lying to you.  That may seem very harsh to say, but it is shocking how common of a problem this still is.

So that’s it for now.  Step 2 of how to do a good blog.  Step 3 hopefully sometime next week.

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