Real Estate Blogs – How To Correctly Use Permalinks And Why

Permalinks – short form for permanent links – are another integral part of real estate blogs (or as I like to call them, “21st century websites”) that will not only assist in gaining the attention of the search engines, but of your specific niche market too.

Ok, so first of all, what are Permalinks?

Permalinks are fixed urls (or domain LINKS) that will never change (ie., PERMANENT) which are created for each post and page that we create within our blogs.

Why are they so important?

Imagine there’s a puzzle which consists of three pieces.  If one of them is missing then the puzzle is not complete and, therefore, unfinished.  Your permalinks is one of those puzzle pieces.  The other two are your

• Blog Post Titles, and your
• Keyword Phrases

All three of these pieces of the puzzle are intertwined and affect each other in a very unique way.  Here’s how:

1. When writing your new real estate blog post, make sure that when POSSIBLE and SENSIBLE (or in otherwords, natural), you use one of your keyword phrases within the 70 characters allowed within the title.  Don’t add them just to keyword stuff – it probably will sound ridiculous and completely unnatural – the opposite of a well-written blog post.
2. Since the title may contain one of your keyword phrases, you should also use it within the first sentence (or 160 characters) of your blog post content and/or derivatives of the keyword phrase – for example if “real estate blogs” is your phrase, a derivaties may be another keyword phrase you are trying to be found on (the almighty) page one of Google, such as “real estate blogging“.
3. Your blog title will determine what your permalink will be (if set up correctly – see video below!), which is what your readers will be directed to via backlinks of the post you add to your social networking sites, and bookmarked for future reading (for example).

How do I correctly set up my Permalinks?

Here’s the important part – how to make sure you have your permalinks set up properly. There are many tasks you have to complete when setting up a new self-hosted blog, one of which is getting your custom-structured permalinks in place.  Here’s a short how-to guide on completing this task in about 30 seconds:

As mentioned in the video, you can read more about the details behind permalinks, the difference between “ugly”, “almost pretty” and “pretty” permalinks, and how they are created on wordpress.org‘s website. Was this information new to you?  Let us know in the comments below!