Creating Custom Permalinks

Blogger or whichever host you use for your blog/website will automatically assign a permalink to your post or page (in the case of a website) of its choosing. For The Failed Author, this presents a problem. My post titles are often ambiguous, and that's a deliberate choice. I want an eye-catching title. While many (not all) of my posts are informational, doing this blog is supposed to be fun, so I compose my titles to be fun, or at least intriguing.

A fun or intriguing title, however, doesn't help its discoverability. First of all, there are no SEO keywords, and secondly, how would my post title even pop up in a search if it's nothing that anyone is searching for?

So, I can either go the boring title route or I can create my own custom permalink. Unlike most bloggers, I don't use WordPress, but my natural assumption is that WordPress, too, allows for customer permalinks. It's just a matter of finding out where to add one. Thus, I'm concentrating on Blogger, but the custom permalink tips are universal.

Choosing one of my past posts at random, one I titled, "Listen Up!", here's Blogger's permalink:

https://www.thefailedauthor.com/2025/05/listen-up.html 

That hardly lets anyone know that all (except for one) of my books are now available on Audible. 

I really need to create a custom permalink for it. 

How?

On the compose screen's righthand margin, there's a "Permalink" header. Clicking on the header opens it:

 

From there, I choose "custom permalink" and change the link to something more relevant. I'll go with "my books are available on Audible", or rather, "my-books-are-available-on-Audible". Each-word-must-be-separated-by-a-hyphen.

Notes from Google:

At present, the characters allowed in a custom URL are limited to: a-z, A-Z, 0-1. The only special characters available are underscore, dash, and period.

For example, a permalink might look like https://www.yourdomain.com/what-is-a-blog

Another example: “https://yourwebsite.com/blog/my-national-park-adventures”.

I'm told it's advisable to omit what are called "stop words", which are considered irrelevant to search engines, and to concentrate more on keywords. (The subject of keywords comes up constantly in SEO world.)

Based on that, I really should leave out the word, "my", but I'm not going to. My link isn't very long, which is another important aspect ~ making it concise ~ and I want it there, even though I know that search engines will ignore it. (It feels to me like "books-are-available" could apply to any books.)

From Google: 

"Stop words are common words in a language (like English) that are generally considered insignificant by search engines when processing queries and indexing content. Examples include articles (a, an, the), prepositions (in, on, of, for, to), conjunctions (and, but, or), pronouns (it, my, your), and other small words." 

*IMPORTANT* If your post is already published and you want to go back and add a custom permalink, you first need to revert the post to a draft, then add your permalink and republish. 

As for my author website, it consists of eight separate pages, and I did the same thing for each of those. For example, on my BOOKS page, I added a permalink that read, "books by women's fiction author April Tompkins" (with the necessary hyphens, of course).  

On a side note, I don't know how much this matters, but you can add alt text to an image you include with your post. 

Again, per Google:

When to change:

Always add descriptive alt text to images that convey information or serve a purpose within your blog post.

 

Focus on crafting descriptive and relevant alt text for your images in Blogger to improve accessibility and SEO. While title text can be used, it's less critical and primarily provides a tooltip (sic). 

 

While you can add title text to images in Blogger, it's not as crucial for accessibility or SEO as alt text. If you choose to use it, make sure it provides additional context or information about the image.

 

In Blogger, that is accomplished by clicking on the image and finding the gear symbol.

 

 

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That will open up the text box. For my post on Pinterest, the alt text looks like this:

 

One somewhat obscure reason why adding alt text to an image can matter is if someone is searching for Google images. I do that a lot, practically every day. This particular image will show up if someone is searching for an image of Pinterest, and it will include the link to where the image was published. Most people probably don't click on the associated link, but I've done it sometimes if it looks interesting. I've actually found useful articles that way. Regardless, alt image text does contribute to SEO, and that's what we're all about.

I like useful things that not too complicated. In my experience, the more complicated a task, the greater the chances are that something will go horribly wrong. (Is it just me?) 

I do need to keep repeating the "keywords" mantra, because my mind doesn't work that way. I'm not a natural keyword stuffer, like some who are only in the game to make money (not that there's anything wrong with making money). I've even disabled the AdSense gadget on this blog. If I pull up a site that's loaded with ads, I quickly click off. I hate it! So, no AdSense for me and my properties. But relevant keywords are important for discoverability, and I'm sure there's a happy medium.

I've blogged for years (and years and years) without any clue about SEO. That could explain a lot, come to think of it...Now, though, I'm willing to give SEO a whirl. As long as it's easy.