Customize Blogger Post URL

Customize blogger post's URL is a very important Search Engine Optimization (SEO) technique. URLs play as important role as blog titles, Bringing the relevant ads for the content is purely depends on your title, URL and Post Content.


I Observed that in blogger the URL length is fixed (38-39 character with max 5-6 spaces include), one can still customize the post URL so as to get relevant ads for the content. The more specific the URL, the more relevant the ads will be.




Its common for someone using blogger to focus on an appropriate title for the blog, post contents and let URL take care of itself. Though blogger appends the fields of your title with '-' in deriving the URL and somehow removes filler words and articles to make your URL relevant, I noted some minor pitfalls due to blogger URL length restrictions which would ignore some important keywords in the post title.



For example if the title of your blog is "Search Engine Optimization".



the blogger post URL would be blogname.blogspot.com/Search-Engine-Optimization.


Well and good, the URL is relevant to the title.



But if you have a title say "Advanced server side programming in java", can you guess what the URL would be, is it



blogname.blogspot.com/advanced-server-side-programming-in-java.html



WRONG.



Due to URL size limits, the title would be different. The following were the URLs I got when I had recreated the same post twice, note that the important keyword "java" is missed.



blogname.blogspot.com/advanced-server-side-programming-in.html
blogname.blogspot.com/advanced-server-side-programming-in_10.html



Also its a common practice to have attractive titles like "Top ten ways to improve your search engine rankings" to attract visitors, again as you guess the blogger URL for the above URL would be something like this.



http://blogname.blogspot.com/top-ten-ways-to-improve-your-search_12.html



missing the important keywords. If the length of the title exceeds the URL size restrictions, blogger would ignore the later part of your title and sometimes substitute random numbers to fill the URL part till its maximum limit is reached



Though this may not drastically affect the relevance of your ads, but why miss an important keyword in the URL.



Here are some steps I would recommend you to follow before posting your content in order to have a relevant URL which won't be missing your keywords.



1. As obvious, once you post an entry and modify its title any number of times, the blogger URL for that post would be the same as that derived from your first title. Therefore before you name your title for the blog, make sure you have a title which is URL friendly, post the blog, edit it, replace the URL customized title with your original title, as length restriction applies only for URL and not for title.



2. Always have important keywords in the beginning of the URL, chances are that longer the URL with keywords at the end, it may be ignored, also avoid using articles and filler words in the URL.



For example for the above title "Advanced Server side programming in java", before posting the content, I would do the following.



2.1 Make sure that all important keywords are preserved, the word "Advanced" in the above title doesn't have much relevance compared to other words, therefore the title for optimizing URL would be



"Server side programming in java"



then post the blog, make sure I get all keywords in the URL or else the post need to be deleted and the title needs to be reworked so that the important keywords won't be missed in the URL.



Similarly for the title "Top ten ways to improve your search engine rankings", the keywords which should have more weightage would be "Search engine rankings" than the first three words, which anyway the title takes care of.



2.2. Edit the blog again, replace the URL customized title with the original one, note that the URL will not change this time.



3. Another way to ensure that your URL remains intact (the way you want to be) is to create it by yourself in the title field the way blogger would do it for you otherwise, like "server-side-programming-in-java", "improving-search-engine-rankings" respectively for the above titles, in this way some articles and filler words may not be removed if you desire, but keep in mind the URL length restrictions.