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There has always been debate about whether keyword-rich urls contribute to a pages SERPs ranking.  It is commonly believed that keywords in the permalink do indeed contribute to a page’s SERPs.

One aspect of site SEO for blogs is to configure a desirable permalink structure.  Essentially, a permalink is a permanent reference url used for access once the post leaves the front (landing) page of your blog.  It is what others will use to link to the post and, perhaps more importantly, the link the search engines will use to identify your post, page or article.  Permalinks should always be unique.

The structure of WordPress permalinks is dictated by a series of settings and parameters found under the Settings -> Permalinks section, within the administrator console.

In order to fully optimise the permalink structure, aim to use your tagret keywords in the leftmost position of the url.  In order to do this you’d need a custom structure containing the single parameter /%postname%.  This creates a permalink based on the post title.  It is then up to you  to choose a unique, keyword-rich and compelling title for each of your posts.

Be aware that using just the /%postname% parameter compels you to create unique titles for every post on your blog in order to avoid collisions (where two articles might have the same permalink, clearly not a good situation).

You should also be aware that if your blog is established with numerous indexed pages, then your should avoid altering your permalink structure without a full understanding of the consequences of that action.  It will affect your backlinks, trackbacks and ultimately your SERPs.  Usually, optimising a blog’s permalink structure should be undertaken during the early stages of the blog’s development, and before  a substantial content base is developed.

There are several plug-ins available that allow auto-manipulation of post slugs and consequently permalinks.  These often remove “noise” words (such as “the”, “and” and alike) with the belief that increasing the overall keyword density of the permalink, and shifting the keywords leftward, will ultimately increase the link weight.  Although these plug-ins might offer some small SEO benefit, be extra cautious when using these on active blogs for the same reasons stated above.

Later iterations of WordPress offer the facilty to edit the permalink before publishing in a box just beneath the post title when writing it.  This way you can manually create a permalink for the post or manually crop noise words prior to publishing.

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Some people want you to believe that search engine optimization is a dying art, and depending on what your definition of SEO is, that may be considered true. At OMS 2010 in San Diego, Greg Jarboe, the president and cofounder of SEO-PR, explained that other (re)definitions of SEO make it very much alive.

As Jarboe has admitted, “The era of ten blue links is dead.” People just can not expect to optimize a page purely by just changing the keywords in metatags anymore. It is very true that much of what so many SEO experts learned ten years ago, has become completely irrelevant in today’s SEO world.

The trick is that expanded search, which can be defined as “search wherever it happens,” is now very important to site exposure. Facebook, eBay, and YouTube users all perform searches, after all, and their attention is valuable. So Jarboe concluded, “If you focus on those kinds of fundamentals, then SEO is alive and kicking.”

How many of Google’s web pages use a descriptive title tag? Do we use description meta tags? Heading tags? While we always try to focus on the user, could our products use an SEO tune up? These are just some of the questions we set out to answer with Google’s SEO Report Card.

Google’s SEO Report Card is an effort to provide Google’s product teams with ideas on how they can improve their products’ pages using simple and accepted optimizations. These optimizations are intended to not only help search engines understand the content of our pages better, but also to improve our users’ experience when visiting our sites. Simple steps such as fixing 404s and broken links, simplifying URL choice, and providing easier-to-understand titles and snippets for our pages can benefit both users and search engines. From the start of the project we also wanted to release the report card publicly so other companies and webmasters could learn from the report, which is filled with dozens of examples taken straight from our products’ pages.

The project looked at the main pages of 100 different Google products, measuring them across a dozen common optimization categories. Future iterations of the project might look at deeper Google product web pages as well as international ones. We released the report card within Google last month and since then a good number of teams have taken action on it or plan to.

We hope you find our SEO Report Card useful and we’d love to hear your feedback in the comments below or in the Webmaster Central Help Forum. And if you’d like to do your own SEO tune up, a good place to start is by reading our free SEO Beginner’s Guide.

Written by Brandon Falls, Adi Goradia, and Charlene Perez, Search Quality Team