Blogs, shortened form of weblogs, are the current rage in online publishing. You might not have a blog, but surely you’ve read or heard about them. Blogs allow millions of people to share their ideas, interests and products. Blogs have become a powerful way of sharing information on any subject thus, creating a more connected and socially aware global community. Like a typical website, a blog needs visitors to ensure its success. Search engines are a main source of readers. The use of search engine optimization is an effective way to drive traffic to a blog. It is important that a blog is optimized for high rankings because high ranking equals online traffic. In this regard, permalinks can help bring significant traffic to a blog.

About Permalinks

A blog is essentially a website consisting of posts or entries arranged in chronological order with the most current post appearing first in the home page. A blog usually consists of the title (headline of the post), post date, body or content, comments added by readers, permalink and category or tag (subject that the post discusses). A permalink indicates the URL (identifier for a document on the internet) which points to a specific blog post. A permalink is what a fellow blogger will use to refer to another blogger’s post. It is used to link to other individual postings. A permalink is usually designated by text link or a symbol. The most common symbol used is the hash sigh (#). Certain blogs use their own symbols such as an asterisk, a dash or a hyphen. A permalink may consist of a string of characters which represent the date of posting, an identifier (domain name) which indicate the author who wrote the item and the post name or title.

A permalink or a permanent link is still available even after the post has been moved from the home page and into the blog archive. Permalinks are permanent. They remain unchanged hence the ‘perma’ in the name. If a post is altered or moved within the database, its permalink remains unchanged.

Permalinks are setup to display in various formats. Different blogging softwares have their own format for permalink URLs. A few examples are: