What is a friendly url for your blog ? How important is a structured url for your wordpress blog ? How easy is it to structure it from your Wordpres admin panel ?
These are some of the questions that I ve been asked often for wordpress blogs.
A SEO friendly url structure allows the spiders to find out the content of your site from the url itself. Which means that you are creating a short cut for the spider to know what your site content is all about. Spiders love it when they dont have to crawl your entire page to figure out the content of your site. Any url that has sensible terms and phrases or word combinations of the same can be termed as SEO friendly url structure.
The amazing part about wordpress is that it gives you the option to do that from the admin panel and chaneg it to suit your requirements, unlike a website where you have to rely on your developer or coder to change it everytime you want to change your content.
Let’s see how you can make the default URL on wordpress search engine friendly.
If you go to Settings > Permalinks form your Dashboard, you’ll reach the permalinks console that let’s you change the url stucture. The default option in wordpress is something like this – www.yoursite.com/p=123
There are other options as well.
1) Day and name – www.yoursite.com/2008/04/22/sample-post
2) Month and name – www.yoursite.com/2008/04/sample-post
3) Numeric – www.yoursite.com/archives/123
4) Custom Structure
The best SEO friendly structure among this is the first one – Day and Time, but you may find that it’s too long. You only need the Year and Month OR the Month and Date OR the Date alone. We don’t need all of them.
So opt for the “Custom Structure” and give in this format – /%year%/%day%/%postname%/
An alternative way of doing it is including your “Categories” in the URL.
/%year%/%category%/%postname%/
I assume that you have SEO friendly categories and are using only one category for each post.
So essentially, make sure that you give all the options on the URL for the search engines to read and make out what the content on your website is all about. So a default option of “www.yoursite.com/?p=123″ gives no information to the search engines, while a custom structure of “www.WebTrafficROI.com/2008/Do-you-have-a-SEO-friendly-wordpress-url-structure” does.
20 comments
Good post. good luck.
Great post, i ll implement this on my blog
One more point – One should change the permalink structure at the start of the blog itself. Since changing it later, causes the previous links to break.
I don’t own a wordpress website as I own an isolated blogging website but Ganesh great tip I didn’t know that, that’s a really helpful tip especially if later down the road I decide to use it
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Ganesh : Thanks for this tip , its very critical to ensure a good permalink structure
Have you tried adding .html in the custom structure field?
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very interesting article. on most issues I agree with the author:)
These days, google doesn’t really care about seo friendly URLs. Still worth using for humans – but they won’t affect your rankings much.
malcolm coless last blog post..SEO friendly URLs: myth and fact
How can it affect your serps ranking? Does it drop it to less than 100?? or 1000 points in terms of droppings? Since later down the road I ever decide to use Wordpress because this would be handy.?
This is very important to bloggers who wish to be found by search engines. Using relevent structure is key to being found.
you definitely need to set up your URL in a way that it can be crawled so that the site content can be visible by the URL for SEO purposes. it is so much more efficient than having the entire content of your page crawled.
I gotta disagree about the first default option being the best one. Even good ol’ Matt Cutts agrees that the best one is going to be custom with %postname% entered, or just /%category%/%postname% depending on how you prefer it.
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This is crucial to blogging.
Hello, I dont know how your blog came up, must have been a typo, Your blog looks awesome, I’ll be back 🙂
This is what can be useful for bloggers who try to visible from search engine.
Friendly URLs are a must and everyone pretty much has them nowadays.
Hi, Thanks for such a good post.. the permalinks part i liked and implemented it in my blog. 🙂
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This is the first thing you should do when you start a blog!
this very good information about perma links of wordpress .. always chose option it’s good for search engine optimization point of view.
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This is the first thing you should do when you start a blog!
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