Using WordPress Permalinks for SEO friendly URLs

30 Mar

If you have a WordPress blog and don’t know about using permalinks, then I will show you how easy it is to make your URL structure more SEO friendly in just a few short steps.

Firstly login to your administrative backend and look for the Settings header on the left sidebar. Underneath that should be a link to the ‘permalinks’ page. On the page you should see that under ‘Common Settings’, that the ‘default’ option is chosen. The example URL should have some php query at the end of it eg. ?php=123

If that is what your current link structure looks like on your WordPress blog, then I suggest you change it. By using the ‘Custom Structure’ option, you can change your URL structure to something far more SEO friendly. What I suggest you do is change it to /%postname% as shown below:

Wordpress Permalinks

This will change your URLs to a structure like this:
http://domain.com/post-title for an individual post.

The reasoning behind this is that Search Engines such as Google DO place emphasis on URLs when deciding to rank a particular page for its keywords. So therefore, if you have a URL that includes the post title, then there is a good chance your post title contains keywords that you want to rank for. In turn, the Search Engines take this into account and you will likely rank higher for particular keywords than if you had an unreadable ‘php query’ URL structure.

This is certainly not to say that you should spam your Post titles with keywords, just remember to make them relevant to the content that you are writing about. If you want to take this even further and want to customize your permalink structure even more, then I suggest you check out this page, on the Official WordPress site.