Bloggers Festival Guru

A few weeks back Blogger added a permalink feature to Blogger In Draft, Blogger In Draft is like a separate dashboard they use to test new features.You may have seen some Blogger related sites write about the permalink feature at the time.I held off covering the topic until the permalink feature was added to the main dashboard.OK, If your thinking 'Test Dashboard' and 'Main Dashboard' what's he talking about, don't worry that's not important.The main point is every blogger user can now choose the URL for their posts.This leads to the next question 'What Is A Permalink?'.

What Is A Permalink

Every post you publish on Blogger has it's own URL or address.Until now this URL was automatically generated.Now however Blogger have giving the you the option to actually choose the URL that will be generated for your posts.

Why Use A Permalink

The main advantage of being able to choose the permalink is Search Engine Optimization (SEO).When you pick the permalink for your post you can add keywords which will help search engines index the post.

How To Use A  Permalink

The next time you log into Blogger to write a post you will see the new permalink option in the post settings on the right of the post editor.Once you are ready to publish the post click on the permalink option.

- You will see 'Automatic URL' checked with a preview of the URL if you leave it as Automatic.
- Below this you will see 'Custom URL', once ticked add the words you want to be in the URL.

Example Of A Good Permalink

So lets say you write a cooking blog and your latest post is about cooking Apple Pie.You title the post 'A Great New Way To Make Mouth Watering Apple Pie'.The URL generated for this post would be something like this :

http://www.yourblog.blogspot.com/2012/07/a-great-new-way-to-make.html

As you can see Blogger have grabbed the first few words for the URL 'A Great New Way To Make'.But these words don't tell search engines anything about the post, however if you choose a custom URL you can have something like this :

http://www.yourblog.blogspot.com/2012/07/recipe-for-cooking-apple-pie.html

Indeed if you look at the URL for this post it is :

http://www.spiceupyourblog.com/2012/07/Blogger-Permalink-SEO-Option.html

Had I not choose it the generated would have been :

http://www.spiceupyourblog.com/2012/07/Blogger-Now-Allow-You-To-Choose.html

Easy to see which is better for SEO.

Now the URL is full of keywords people search for and Google crawlers can use to index the post.

Note - You need to add the hyphen, this guy : - .So when adding your custom URL don't leave a space between words add-a-hyphen-between-them-link-this.

The Ever Improving Blogger SEO

You know when I first joined Blogger they tended to stay away from SEO, but over the last year they really have raised the bar.The New SEO Features they added last month were awesome and with this update they are doing more to help you get your blog ranked in search.I have been critical when needed but Kudos to the Blogger team for these updates.