SEO Basics: Permanent URLs

Permanent URLs are an important part of SEO. With permanent URLs, you can convert your file type in the future and it won’t affect the ranking and traffic of your pages.

The premise of Permanent URLs is that if you change an about.html page to an about.php page, all those backlinks you have generated through your hardwork will become broken links because they’ll point to an about.html page instead of an about.php page. So what’s the solution?

The simplest way to create a permanent URL is to create a folder instead of a page as your page’s URL. Let’s go back to the about.html example. Create a folder with a URL of http://yourdomain.com/about. Then place a index.php or index.html page in that folder. Also change all your links to your about page to the folder, NOT the actual file name. This way, when you change the type of file that your default page in that folder is, it won’t create broken links.

Most content managing or blogging software out there should already create Permanent URLs for you. However, if you’re making your own website, be careful to implement Permanent URLs now lest you change your files from html to php later and lose credibility with a large number of broken links.