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Check your Blog Post URLs - Are they Search Engine Optimized?

A quick search engine optimization (SEO) tip to share today...

Check out this excellent blog post by Greg Fleischaker in Louisville, KY - "Homes For Sale Louisville: Home Prices Drop Back Down To April Levels." Here's why the post is really good:

It's succinct - very easy for the reader to grab and read the info that Greg is sharing
He's talking about relevant market information - answering the "How's the market?" question that EVERYONE has.
There's an image included - in this case, he's using an AltosChart to show the reader the trends that he's discussing.
Greg's included his own analysis to show his readers his local market expertise.

As I was reading Greg's blog, there was one place that I noticed he could improve - and it's not even in the blog post itself - it's in the URL of the blog post.

Here's the blog post URL:

http://www.louisvillekyrealestateblog.com/?p=526

The p=526 is the way that his blogging software indexes the article - it automatically assigns a number to the blog post. However, one of Google's SEO variables is key words in the URL. When Google sends out it's search engine crawlers to see what is on a web page (or a blog post in this case), one of the biggest variables is the URL. If the URL contains key words, that will dramatically help with page ranking in Google.

For example, from a recent post on the Altos Research blog:

http://blog.altosresearch.com/us-housing-reports-releases-september-2009/

Notice how the title of the post is in the URL? This will help on Google when people search on Google for "US Housing Reports," Google sees that search term in the blog post URL and then says - "Here's a webpage that has what the searcher is looking for" and thus helps page ranking for individual posts.

Most blogging software programs such as WordPress should have a tool that allows you to change the "p=526" to match the title of your post.

That's my quick tip of the week. (And don't worry - I asked Greg if it was okay to feature his blog in this post. He does excellent work blogging and on Twitter!)

Posted by Scott Sambucci on 10/07/2009 09:24 AM

Comments (9)

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9 Comments on Check your Blog Post URLs - Are they Search Engine Optimized?

OCT

This is a very useful tip and something I was unaware of. Thanks for the heads up.

The nice thing about AR is that they do the serial # thing for the post, then they add the title as part of the URL. So it would seem that we may want to somehow add our own website into the title on AR blog posts?

Check the url in the browser window above this article. The title is in the URL, but nothing to tie it back to you as the author.

Hi Mike - I wouldn't recommend adding the URL of your website in every blog post. Google only looks at the first few works of the blog post title and adding your website URL would likely have very little effect.

This is extremely interesting. Is there any way that it can be changed from a number?

Hi Leolinda - There should be a place in your blogging software that allows you to do that.

In my haste to publish my blog posts, this is often overlooked....thanks for the important reminder!

Tina in Virginia

Scott - this is a great tip. I often wondered why certain posts show up higher in the ranks than others - guess I should go back and check the URLs.

Hey Scott,

Thanks so much for taking time out of your day to point this out to me yesterday. I've already made the necessary changes, but haven't tested it out yet, to make sure my url improves.

You, and everyone else at Altos, have been great to work with and really look out for all of your subscribers, and I am truly appreciative.

Greg Fly

OCT

Hi Greg - Thanks for the props!

-Scott

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