Permalinks and SEO for WordPress

Posted by Madhavi on Apr 27, 2011 in WordPress 101 | 1 comment

The word ‘Permalink’ is a combination of the words ‘permanent’ and ‘link’. Essentially, these are the links or the URLs of the different pages and posts on your WordPress website. And once they are created, they remain more or less permanent, unless you deliberately go and change them.

While these links serve their purpose, wouldn’t you like to know how you could make them do their share of SEO work for you?

The best way to get your WordPress website’s URLs to do some SEO for you is to adjust their Permalink Structure. Today, lets see how we can set up a SEO friendly permalink structure for your WordPress website / blog.

Permalinks are also often known as Pretty Links – and that’s for a very good reason too! These links make your default WordPress URLs look mighty pretty all right!

If you’ve just set up a WordPress blog, and haven’t done anything to alter or change your permalink structure, then the links of your website are most probably going to look like the ‘Default’ setting in the image below.

However, if you’ve done your job right, and have pretty URLs or Permalinks set up properly, then this is how the website URL is probably going to look like.

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Lets have a quick look at why it is important to set up the right permalink structure for your WordPress site, and what are the good tags that can be used to set up your permalink structure.

Permalinks and SEO

Just as the title tag of the post or page adds value to the search engine optimization of your web page’s content, the URL of the page or post also works towards helping this process. If your post or page has a default URL set up, then the crawlers are not going to find it easy to index your page properly. However, if your post name or page name (which should ideally have the main keyword in it) are a part of the URL itself, then the site crawlers will be able to index the post and the keywords in a better manner.

Doing this will only serve to help you make your website search engine friendly.

Permalink Tags for SEO

In order to create a suitable permalink setup for your website, you first need to know the default permalink tags that can be used for this purpose. If you are really in the mood, you can also go check out the information on Permalinks on the WordPress Codex website.

Meanwhile, here is a quick list of the acceptable Permalink tags that you can use to add more SEO value to your blog post or page.

• %year%
• %monthnum%
• %day%
• %hour%
• %minute%
• %second%
• %post_id%
• %postname%
• %category%
• %tag%
• %author%

All these are pretty self-explanatory. You can easily use these permalink tags in combination to create a permalink structure that you desire for your WordPress website. The only thing to remember while combining these permalink tags is to use the “/” (forward slash) [and of course, not the quote marks] in between them.

Meanwhile, there are some suggested, SEO friendly permalink structure sets that really work great.

Here is a quick list of such SEO friendly permalink structure sets:

• /%year%/%postname%
• /%postname%
• /%category%/%postname%
• /%postname%.html
• /%category%/%postname%.html

This way you can have a very nice, and very SEO friendly URL structure for your entire blog post.

My Recommendation

While any of the above-mentioned permalink structure sets work really great for a website’s SEO, my favorite is the /%category%/%postname% structure.

This structure makes a lot of sense especially if you have a website that has a lot of blog posts. And it works great even for the static pages. This structure ensures that your blogs category names are also indexed along with the names of your blog post articles.

Other Recommendations

Other people also recommend adding the %year% tag before the %category% tag. This makes sense if you have a lot of posts and have been writing on the blog for several years, and more so if the information that you put in your blog posts could easily get dated. This structure can appeal to people who have a news updates based blog.

In Conclusion…

Permalink Structures can really help your WordPress blog / website’s SEO process because link URLs help search engine crawlers and bots easily recognize the main keywords and content of that particular blog post or page. Besides, depending on your website’s functionality and blog content amount, you can choose the distinct structure you want to use – thus giving you a whole lot of flexibility.

So, which permalink structure set would you think is appropriate for your website and why? Lets talk about it in the comments section below.

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