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!)