WordPress SEO – Best Permalinks Structure For Your Blog

As many of you already know that search engines like Google are the best source of getting free and targeted traffic to your sites. Search engine optimization become more important when it comes to getting traffic from search engines. As a blogger we mostly use wordpress platform to start blogging which is already very much SEO optimized but there is no doubt it lacks some features that we need to add via plugins or configure in it from its settings to make it completely search engine optimized.

When you install the wordpress blog it gives your blog a dynamic URL structure which is not a good SEO practice and in order to make it more SEO friendly you need to change the permalinks structure of your wordpress blog.

Its very easy to change the permalinks structure of your wordpress blog, you just need to go to “permalinks” under the “setting” and from there you can easily configure the search engine friendly permalinks for your blog. At the end of this post I will also mention some of the best SEO friendly parmalinks options that you just need to copy and paste in your blog to make it more search engine friendly.

But if you didn’t know this at the time when you installed your blog then there is way to still change the permalinks without breaking any of your existing links by using the 301 redirect. Using the 301 redirect will make sure that you will not lose any traffic from search engines and you can use wordpress redirection plugin that will make this job easier for you . So if you haven’t changed your permalinks to make them search engine friendly then this is the right time to do it and check the following options for permalinks that you can use to make your blog URLs more search engine friendly.

Choose your SEO Friendly Permalinks Structure:

Go to Setting > Permalinks and then choose custom option.

Following are some options that you can choose for permalinks:

/%postname%.html (It will show a post tile in the URL, I am using this structure)

/%postname%/ (It will only show postname without .html extension)

From SEO perspective there is no difference between the above two permalinks, I have choosen .html extension to make it look more static.

/%category%/%postname%.html ( This structure will show the name of the category in URL)

/%category%/%postname% (You will not have .html extension, that’s the only difference in it)

There are also other options available that you can choose from that are equally search engine friendly.

Important Note:

I also want to tell you that if you are using category within your permalinks structure then do not assign a post to more than 1 category. If you assign a post to “SEO” category and same post to “wordpress” category then the preference will goes to the category which have a higher ID.

For example if you have created a post that is mainly centered about SEO  and you have assigned that post to two categories”SEO” and “wordpress“. So for this situation your 1st preference for the URL should be that “SEO” category will come in  the URL which has a category ID 5 but if  “wordpress” catgeory has 4 ID then it will take “wordpress” in the URL instead of “SEO“  like http://www.corebloggers.com/wordpress/post-name/

So just choose your permalinks carefully and do not forget to share your opinion about this post.

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