If you’re a WordPress or Typepad blogger, you’ve long been able to create custom permalinks for your blog posts, but this week Blogger finally started offering the feature to its users.
It’s being rolled out to everyone gradually but if you can’t see the option yet, try logging in to draft.blogger.com rather than blogger.com. So we’ve put together a simple tutorial for Blogger users who’d like to try this new feature.
Why is this interesting?
By default, when you create a new post in Blogger, the permalink (or the URL for your post) will look something like this:
http://[blogname]/2012/06/[abbreviatedtitle].html
Search engines like Google will look at this address to decide what your post is all about. In an ideal world, your permalink will describe the content perfectly – and your blog will rank highly in relevant searches.
But that doesn’t always work.
- Sometimes you write a long blog title, and Blogger shortens it, cutting off the end of important words
- Sometimes you write a post with a brilliant, pun-tastic headline that isn’t really very descriptive of the content
- Sometimes you want to optimise for keywords that you don’t want to include in the headline
This is no longer a problem!
Blogger users are now able to create a custom permalink – which means you can define what appears in the URLs of your post. If you want to boost your blog traffic, you can use custom permalinks to include relevant words in your URL, helping your post to rank higher in search results. Hurrah!
What you need to do:
To use a custom permalink, in your Blogger dashboard, go to ‘create new post’
On the right-side of the screen you should see a new section called ‘permalink’. Click on this.
By default, your post’s permalink will say ‘automatic’ but if you select ‘custom URL’ you’ll be able to type in a new URL for this post. You can use pretty much any letters or numbers – but not certain special characters.
It’s that simple to create shorter and more SEO-friendly URLs for your Blogger blog posts!
About Sally
Sally Whittle is founder of the Tots100, Foodies100, BlogSummit and the MAD Blog Awards. When she's not working, she can be found blogging at Who's the Mummy, or having fun with her 7 year old daughter, Flea.
That was really useful Sally. Thanks
Thank you Sally. This works for new posts but not for old ones..Bummer!
Oooh, thats really useful to know. Although it definitely hasn’t been rolled out to my account yet so I’ll see if I can see it in the draft version. Will definitively be using this feature as I’m a bit guilty of using poetic or vague titles that don’t say that much about the post content. Thanks. X
Thanks Sally, I hadn’t really grasped what permalinks were and certainly wouldn’t know how to do it in Blogger. I’m off to see if I have that option.