WordPress SEO Tip – Change Your Permalink Structure
In this video tip I want to show you a simple and easy way to optimize your WordPress site for the search engines that will help to drive more traffic to your site.
It basically involves configuring your Permalinks (i.e. the links that WordPress automatically generates for your posts and pages) to make them more search engine “friendly”.
This is a very quick and easy customization to make and in the mid-long term can have a positive impact on your search engine rankings and the amount of traffic you receive.
Quick note: If you have any issues with seeing the video you might want to watch it in HD and full screen mode.
Video Notes
Permalinks are the URLs that are generated when you create a new post or page on your WordPress site – by default they typically look something like “http://www.vooshthemes.com/gallery/rikona/?p=26″ where the “p=26″ points to the unique identification number of the post/page.
However, this isn’t very helpful for the search engines as they look at the keywords and phrases used in the URL when deciding on how to rank a post/page. Therefore, as you can probably imagine, having “p=26″ is essentially meaningless – having something like the title of the post included in the URL would be much more useful.
Luckily this is very simple to do – select the “Permalinks” page from the Settings menu in your WordPress Admin area. Then select “Custom Structure” and type /%postname%/ in the textfield – save your changes.
If you then check your site you should notice that all your posts and pages now have the title included in the URL. This is much better as it will give the search engines a better idea about the sort of content on your site and you’ll potentially rank higher for certain keywords and phrases.
March 30th, 2010 at 2:43 am
Are you sure that pages with such keywords in their URIs are ranked better? Some people say it would matter and others say it would not. Do you know some research about it? See also http://stackoverflow.com/questions/522466/
March 30th, 2010 at 3:23 am
Hi Christian – you’re right that there are differing views about this – in the following video Matt Cutts talks about keywords in the URL and states that they do have an impact. However, he also makes the important point that content is king – the best form of SEO that you can do is to create quality content that others want to link to.
May 11th, 2010 at 8:22 pm
Thanks I have been hashing around with the permalink structure till this
May 13th, 2010 at 10:07 am
Damn that was easy. Thanks man.
July 7th, 2010 at 12:23 am
There has been a great deal of debate of how WordPress queries the database to sort from text and vairables in its rewrites:
http://ottopress.com/2010/category-in-permalinks-considered-harmful/