I have a confession to make … I had been blogging for several years and was simply not aware of the special importance of permalinks. In fact, when I migrated my blogs over to Wordpress a couple of years ago, a friend pointed out that my blog permalinks were broken and, shhh … let me whisper to you … I didn’t know what he was talking about! So, I quickly learned about permalinks.

Wikipedia has a good explanation of permalinks - “A permalink is a URL that points to a specific blog or forum entry after it has passed from the front page to the archives. Because a permalink remains unchanged indefinitely, it is less susceptible to link rot.

“An entry in a blog with many entries is accessible from the site’s front page for only a short time. Visitors who store the URL for a particular entry often find upon their return that the desired content has been replaced by something new. Prominently posting permalinks is a method employed by bloggers to encourage visitors to store a more long-lived URL (the permalink) for reference.”

Permalinks it turns out are very important to blogging and essential for building visibility.

Each time a new post is created on a blog, it is automatically given a designated permalink that makes it easily identified and found out in the vast Internet, with its seemingly infinite depth. That special permalink is very easily seen or “pinged” by search engines and blog content indexing services, such as Google, Technorati and Feedburner.

Here’s where my initial unfamiliarity with permalinks led to my friend making me aware — when a blog is first set up on Wordpress, permalinks are set to “default.” (inside the control panel, see Settings –> Permalinks.) The default setting really only gives each new posting a sequential number, beginning with “1.” Nothing special about that and, consequently, search engines are challenged to find updates on your blog.

The optimum permalink setting, whether using Wordpress or any other blogging service, is “Day and Name” (the second choice in Wordpress). Day and Name assigns the date of the posting and a specific name that is determined by the title you have given the posting. Under such a setting, I have found that search engines can be alerted to the new post within as little as one minute, far faster than the old-fashioned HTML style of Web sites.