Everyone wants an SEO optimized WordPress site.
Millions of websites use WordPress as a CMS and cover a wide range of topics from entertainment, to pets, to food and what not.
All these sites sport unique url structures which different from site to site. There’s no common theme that unites them. But among all the url structures that are possible only a few are SEO friendly. In this post we will be discussing that.
But not many realize that on WordPress, it begins with the blog post URL structure.
URL Structures are Permanent
A URL structure is permanent and doesn’t change with time unless you change the permalinks. And I suggest not doing that once you’ve been blogging for sometime. Because all the sites that link to your website will see a broken link.
That’s the reason why it’s so important to get this right at the start itself.
I wouldn’t be wrong in calling WordPress the most popular CMS in the world and despite that their default permalink structure is not SEO friendly.
I am not sure what message they want to give to the world with this but it’s certainly not the right one. When you create a blog the platform automatically sets default permalinks for you. It starts with p followed by number assigning the post id for the particular blog post.
The number used in the url structure is where the post will be found online.
Here’s an example of the same.
seekdefo.com/?p=100
As blog editor and owner you’re allowed to change this from the Permalink settings but as said earlier after you’ve started blogging doing so can result in lost links, lost referral and search engine traffic. Search engine traffic may come back but referrals most likely won’t.
What makes a URL good for both humans and SEO bots?
The first criteria is that the structure shouldn’t be cryptic. It should be human readable and easy to understand. A series of page numbers doesn’t fulfill that criteria. Plus by removing numbers and adding keywords gets you another opportunity to add keywords that matter to the blog post, improving it’s probability of snagging up a few more ranks on search engines.
What do I have against the date format or month format?
Examples are as follows:
Day and Name: Here permalinks contain the date and name of the post.
seekdefo.com/2018/05/28/post-on-permalinks/
Month and Name: Here the date is not included, just the month and year.
seekdefo.com/2018/09/post/
Some people follow the date format or the month format for structuring urls. I don’t.
The date format is excellent if its a news website or some form of site that publishes hundreds of posts consistently.
But for most of us, the name format is better because it allows us to update the date of the post and republish it every now and then.
This gives more visibility to the post and a sense of it being evergreen.
If you look closely at blog post structure on the Seekdefo blog you will notice one consistent theme. There are no date numbers in the post url. It just consists of a few words of the post title.
Say the post title is: “a guide on making urls seo friendly”, the url might be seekdefo.com/make-urls-seo-friendly/
That’s it.
Using the custom structure
This one allows you to set tags according to your desired format. For instance you could use any number of tags like %year% or %postname%. But one format I’ve seen seasoned SEOs using is the category name followed by post name
Here’s that.
%category%%postname%. I think this format is a bit better than only postname for search engine indexing and ranking. Finally,here’s how to structure your site settings to be able to do that. On your WordPress dashboard, go to settings and then select permalink. From permalink options you will find many url structures
To sum things up:
The default one displays page number
The second option displays day and name
Third option is for month and name
Fourth option displays a random number
Fifth option displays post name which is what I use.
The last option allows you to specify a custom structure. Here you can add category name which according to many SEOs is a splendid SEO option.
%category%/%postname%
I choose to go with the postname option and that’s what you presently see on Seekdefo.
So that’s how you structure SEO friendly urls on WordPress.
