What Is a Permalink?

Good question.

The word permalink, short for permanent link is essentially the URL of a web page – and not to be confused with the main URL of a site.

For example, the permalink for this web page is:

http://www.affordableseoconsultants.com/permalink

Whereas the URL for this site is:

http://www.affordableseoconsultants.com/

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Here’s an example of some permalinks:

Yep, they’re in the green colour and follow after the .com/.org/.co.uk backslashes.

Note positions two and three in the above screenshot are main URLs. The other results displayed are permalinks (sub-pages of a main website).

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Permalinks are great for helping with SEO. Getting your web pages ranking for your chosen keywords is much easier if they’re optimised correctly.

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Here’s some examples of good permalinks:

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Here’s some examples of bad permalinks:

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You’d be surprised how many bloggers getting decent traffic levels don’t appreciate a good permalink. If only they knew what you now know, hey.

Tip: Prepare your blog posts, web pages, categories, in fact anything that comes after your .com/.net/.co.uk backslashes with an SEO friendly permalink in mind once you know the keyword(s) you want to target. It’ll take you a couple of minutes longer than if not optimising, but will be worth it for the increase in free organic traffic in the long-run.

Tip: WordPress users can install the All in One SEO Pack to help optimise their permalinks.

Oh, and one last thing: you may also hear permalinks being referred to as slugs.

Hope the above helps with your SEO.

Sincerely,

SEO Sam

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