WordPress SEO For Beginners: The Permalinks

People that are new to blogging tend to setup and develop their blogs in ways that hinder their search engine rankings. Getting your blog articles ranking better in the search engines doesn’t have to be a mystery; with just a little background knowledge a person can easily transform their underachieving blog into a search engine champ!

It would be best to break down WordPress SEO into multiple subtopics. The four main areas a new blogger (or any blogger for that matter!) should focus on are:

• Permalinks
• Meta tags
• Blog layout
• Content

I chose this topical order as this is the order in which the search engines view your site. Starting with the permalink (web address of your blog article), the search engine spiders see your meta tags then crawl through your blog’s layout and index your content.

WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks are simply the specific URL for each blog post you publish. WordPress has a default method of handling permalinks where each article is identified by a post number, i.e robmcguire.net/?p=123 Notice the “?p=123” at the end of the URL? That is the permalink.

Why WordPress continues to set this type of permalink structure as default is a mystery to me, but thankfully this can be changed. In the “Settings” section of the WordPress admin area there is a subsection called “Permalinks”, and in that area some SEO customization can be done.

The first thing you see in the Permalinks area are a few options in your permalink structure. The standard options are “Default”, “Day and Name”, “Month and Name”, “Numeric”, and “Custom Structure”. I’ll tell you right now that the default and numeric options should be avoided as they provide no SEO benefits. They are in fact horrible and can actually be detrimental to your efforts.

The best permalink structure is one which contains keywords pertinent to your article in it! And the most obvious choice for relevant keywords would be the title of your published article. Therefore, you should aim for a permalink structure which incorporates the title of the post that is contained in it.

You could choose either the “Day and Name” or the “Month and Name” structure, and you would be doing well with either choice. But you can take this a step further if you want the most SEO optimization for your WordPress permalinks.

The optimal structure would be to include your article’s title as well as it’s category in the URL. When you include the category in the URL structure you are including a relevant keyword in your overall permalink. This type of permalink structure can be accomplished by choosing the “Custom Structure” option and entering:

/%category%/%postname%/

If you enable this type of structure to your blog’s URL’s you will eventually see higher rankings in the search engines for your published articles as opposed to using the WordPress default method.

Example of the difference

Let’s say you just published an article titled “The Best Downtown Restaurants” under the category of “Chicago”. If you were using the default WordPress permalink structure, your final URL to this article might look like this:

http://www.yoursite.com/?p=356

And if you are using the recommended permalink structure, that same article would have this URL:

http://www.yoursite.com/chicago/the-best-downtown-restaurants

As you can see, the preferred permalink method is much better because it is loaded with relevant keywords to your article.

Why is this important?

Even the content of a website’s URL plays an important role in the search engine rankings. Search engines, especially Google, place a high value on the words that are in the URL and rank them accordingly.

For example, I own the domain “xsportzsunglasses.com”. XSportz sunglasses are a particular brand of cheap sunglasses, but I have been using that domain just to publish content about wholesale sunglasses in general. You can search that entire site and you will not find the word “xsportz” or “xsportz sunglasses” printed. Not even once. Yet if you were to Google “xsportz sunglasses” you’ll see that my site is the 3^rd site listed, and it’s high ranking is attributed to the fact that the domain’s URL contains those keywords.

Changing horses in midstream

If you have been blogging for some time with a permalink structure that could use improvement, it’s possible to change your method and go on without wrecking your site.

When I say “wrecking your site”, what I’m referring to is the mega-upheaval that could happen if this is not done properly. If you were to suddenly change your permalink structure and walk away, a few things will happen. First, every website or search engine that links to your posts will now be greeted by a 404 error because the old URL of your article now no longer exists. Search engines don’t particularly like 404 errors.

Second, all page rank being passed to your posts through the links on other sites would become null and void. You just can’t receive something if it’s not addressed properly.

Now the good news is that the above disaster scenario would not have happened if you set up some 301 redirects. 301 redirects prevent the dreaded 404 errors when content has moved to a different location.

Perhaps the easiest method to apply redirects on your WordPress blog after you change your permalink structure is to install Dean’s Permalink Migration plugin. This plugin will handle everything for you in this matter, and you won’t face any negative consequences for changing the way your blog creates URL’s.

Final notes on permalinks

Incorporating a good permalink structure for your WordPress blog will pay you dividends for the life of your blog through search engine traffic. The better your structure = higher search engine rankings = more search engine traffic for you.

Be sure to check in tomorrow for information on the meta tags!

Tagged as: permalinks, SEO, Wordpress