Blogger: How to create SEO friendly URLs

If you aren’t careful Blogger will automatically create SEO UNfriendly urls based on the post title. Read on to learn how to overcome this and create SEO friendly urls with Blogger.

Fact #1: Search engines match words contained within your urls with keywords users enter into searches. For example, if a user enters “smoked salmon recipe”, your page will rank higher if your url is something like “/smoked-salmon-recipe.html”. Your url is more SEO friendly if it contains those keywords.

Fact #2: Blogger only allows 39 characters in url names and creates the url when you publish the blog post for the first time.

Fact #3: You cannot change a Blogger url after it has been published. You must delete the post and try again.

You could have a beautifully long and descriptive title like “how to cook the most fabulous smoked salmon you’ll ever taste.” and upon first save Blogger will create the following page name for you “/how-to-cook-the-most-fabulous-smoked.html”. As you can see the url is missing your main keyword: salmon. Not good.

Here’s how to create SEO friendly URLs the right way:

1. Determine what keywords are most important for your post. In my example, the keywords are “best smoked salmon recipe”.

2. Create a new post and enter those keywords in a way that limits the full string to 39 characters (the max amount of characters that Blogger allows). You can use WordCounter.net to determine the exact length of your string. In my case, my string “best smoked salmon recipe” is only 25 characters, so we are in good shape. Blogger will convert spaces to hyphens and will trim words like “the”, “a” and “and”. So play with it a bit until you find the exact url you want. Start with the fewest most descriptive keyword string and see if it works for you by following step 3…

3. Enter the short post title “best smoked salmon recipe”. Enter the post content. Click Publish.

4. Verify that the url is exactly how you want it. If not, then you need to delete the post and try a different short title. Be careful doing this though because once you create another title that is similar to the original Blogger may tack on an integer to the end and it will look pretty ugly. For example, it might look something like: “/best-smoked-salmon-recipe_30.html”.

5. Update the post title to the long version of the title: “How to cook the most fabulous smoked salmon you’ll ever taste.”. Click Publish.

6. Make sure your FeedBurner feed is refreshed with the long title. See my “Solution to FeedBurner being out of sync with feed, FeedBurner Ping Service” post for more details.

There you have it. A SEO friendly Blogger url and a post with a long descriptive title.

URL: “/best-smoked-salmon-recipe.html”
Title: “How to cook the most fabulous smoked salmon you’ll ever taste.”

Jon