Do you have a SEO friendly Wordpress url structure

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.