WordPress is one of the most popular content management platforms with regards to its search engine optimization advantages and user friendly solutions. WordPress itself is an excellent blog platform for SEO, but there are also lots of changes you can make in order to additionally improve it for Google and other search engines to get the best possible search engine visibility.
When we make a new WordPress blog there are a number of things we must do if we desire to achieve love of search engines. But a lot of us are not aware about the number of opportunities we have in order to make our website’s SEO stronger. One of the most important WordPress Configurations is setting up a SEO friendly permalink structure. A proper permalink helps our website to get our search engine results higher than the competitors.
Setting up your WordPress permalinks is easy and just needs a few seconds, however knowing what it is and the way it works is the key to establishing the perfect permalink structure. Our website’s links are just like the street address of our web pages. This must be the initial task when we make a new WordPress blog because modifying permalinks after making some posts will need a lot more work. It helps to both the visitors as well as the search engines to figure out your website’s pages.
WordPress provides us with several methods in order to structure our post links. Default permalink structure includes the post ID being a unique identifier just like http://www.doname.com/?p=321. This is dynamically generated number that varies for every post. Same case is with the Numeric Structure option.
Disadvantage: This is clearly not best as we aren’t getting the advantages of using keywords in the web page link. We must modify our website links in order that they don’t present non descriptive words that are not good for your website readers because it does not explain what kind of content is displayed to both the users as well as the search engines.
WordPress also provide option to make the links shown by year/month/date format, just like http://www.domain.com/2012/09/18/post-name/. This gets better than the default structure as we can give a post name that describes what is in the content.
Disadvantage: The post will be under four directories which will lead to possible crawling problems by search engines.
Advantage: Google ranks web pages depending on presence of keywords in the web address as well as various other aspects. You can easily confirm my concept by looking in the search results page of Google, since all the keywords showing up in the link will be highlighted also.
In order to modify the default URL structure to the most perfect structure that will be more SEO friendly as well as readable, go to Settings > Permalinks. You will find a radio button option labeled “Post Name” as shown in the picture below. Click on it and then click “Save Changes”. This option will make your permalinks according to your post title that will be more attractive as well as perfect for search engines visibility in result pages.
When you are done saving, you will have same URL structure as we are using here on Webmasters Eye. These types of URLs help the search engine optimizations and far more appealing as compared to the old ugly permalinks.
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