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WordPress SEO Tip – How To Shorten Your Permalinks

In today’s video tip I want to show you another simple way in which you can enhance your WordPress blog posts for the search engines.

In my last video I discussed how changing the structure of your permalinks can potentially have a positive impact on your search engine rankings and help to drive more traffic to your site.

In this video I want to focus on the length of the permalinks that WordPress automatically generates for you and how this can influence the position of your site in the search engines.

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

There has been quite a bit of research which has suggested that Google and the other search engines aren’t particularly keen on excessively long URLs.

This can cause a problem when using WordPress as it will automatically generate a URL for you based on the title of your post (check out my previous video tip on changing your permalink structure).

This means that if the title of a new blog post you’re creating is quite long, you might want to change it to something that is shorter, more specific, and contains some well targeted key phrases (take a look at this post for choosing good keyphrases to target).

Fortunately WordPress makes this very simple to do – in the screenshot below, I’ve created a blog post with a long title that I’ve made up. By default, WordPress will create a very long permalink for this post that will contain each of the words in the title:

To change the permalink, select the “Edit” button just under the title. This will allow you to alter the URL that WordPress has generated for the post:

Remove all of the non-essential keywords. In this example, I’d probably look to remove things like “top”, “50″, “for” and “and” – once you’ve done this click the “OK” button (highlighted above) and WordPress will then change the permalink for this post.

Nice and simple, and it will help to keep the search engines happy! You always want to give your site’s content the best chance of ranking well and this is a simple and subtle way that you can help to improve its chances of getting a higher position.