Optimizing Permalinks for WordPress

It is best that you optimize your URL structure, when you first setup your WordPress blog. By doing this, you will 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.

- - Why would I want to change 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 change 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 - -

Hope this blog post was helpful to you, - - Optimizing Permalinks for WordPress - -

Spunky Jones.

1. Are You Using Dean’s Permalinks Migration Plugin For WordPress?
2. SEO Strategy, to Increase Website Traffic to Your Blog
3. What’s all the fuss about the importance of the blog post title?
4. Optimizing Title Tags for Better SEO
5. Are you using search engine friendly URLs to increase rankings?
6. Creating SEO Friendly alt title tags for WordPress
7. WordPress, approves three of Spunky Jone’s SEO Plugins!
8. SEO Strategy – Optimizing the Title Tag
9. Round One: alt tag versus title tag for WordPress images!
10. Are you using keyword rich titles to achieve top search engine rankings?