Optimizing Permalinks for your WordPress Blog URL structure is essential. By optimizing your URLs, you’ll save yourself a lot of time, and many headaches later on down the road. Your URL permalink structure shouldn’t contain numbers and/or strange characters. You want a user/search engine friendly URL structure which is easy to read, which describes the content of your page.
- Optimizing Permalinks Facts -
- – Why would I want to optimize my permalink structure, from it’s default setting? – -
Search engine friendly URLs, have a tendency to rank higher in the search engines and drive more traffic to your blog. If your permalink URL structure is easy to read, people are more inclined to visit.
Example of a URL with poor structure:
http://www.domain.com/2008/10/10/archives/p=?2758
Example of a URL with good structure:
http://www.domain.com/category/post-title/
Example of a URL with good structure:
http://www.domain.com/post-title/
- – How to optimize your WordPress Permalinks – -
1. Login to your WordPress account.
2. Navigate to the dashboard.
3. Options > Permalinks.
4. Check the “Custom” structure
5. Insert – /%category%/%postname%/ or you can insert /%postname%/
Save, and you are done.
I have noticed that more and more A list bloggers are switching over to http://www.domain.com/post-title/ for their WordPress permalink structure. I believe that the reason is that the search engines can spider it better, and it may get better pagerank. If you use this permalink structure, I suggest that you disallow “page” in your robots.txt file or your SEO plugin.
Additional thoughts: It is my opinion that using /%category%/%postname%/as your permalink structure is better for SEO, but your categories must be carefully named to get the added SEO edge.
Need more permalink variables? Head on over to WordPress Permalinks page for more details.
- – Please note: Currently, this will not work for blogs, that are hosted on wordpress.com – -
YouTube related “Optimizing Permalinks” video