This is the second article of our new Series: From Zero to WordPress Rockstar in which we will do a simple but yet very effective task for our WordPress site.
Why using SEO friendly URL Structure
WordPress has a built in option for SEO friendly URLS or how WordPress calls them: Permalinks.
Without permalinks enabled, a post on your WordPress powered site will look something like http://www.chlog.net/?p=615 (which, for example, is the non-permalink URL for this article).
Now with Permalinks enabled the URL to this post is http://www.chlog.net/wordpress/seo-friendly-url-structure/ just like you can see up in your adress bar right now. Now this is important because of two things actually. The first positive effect of this is for SEO reasons. Search engines have a text with keywords to be searched for instead of just a ?p= followed by numbers which is positive for your ranking in search engine. The second effect is that people probably can remember your URL, or at least they can see what it is about if your link is posted somewhere else.
Enable SEO friendly URLS for your site
WordPress makes this quite an easy task to do. If you log in into your WordPress admin panel you can find this option on the left side in the menu on the link Permalinks right within the Settings section. Out of the box WordPress offers you four pre-made structures which are:
- Default – As the name implies this is just how the URLS will look as default. Nothing pretty and we don’t want that.
- Day and Name – Included in the URL are the year, the day, the month and the post name.
- Month and Name – This shows your posts with a URL of the year, the month and the post name.
- Numeric – Will show the post with numbers.
- %year% – The year of the post as four digists (example: 2011)
- %monthnum% – The month as two digits (example: 03 for March)
- %day% – The day of the month as two digit number (example 02)
- %hour% – The Hour of the day (example 10)
- %minute% – The minute of the hour (example 55)
- %second% – The second of the minute (example 23)
- %postname% – The sanatized version of the post title. (example this posts title is SEO friendly URL Structure – the URL will be seo-friendly-url-structure)
- %post_id% – The ID of the post (example 123)
- %category% – The name of the Category the post is published in (example: wordpress)
- %author% – The author name (example: admin)
If you have found a structure you like, simply safe the changes at the bottom of the page. WordPress will automatically update your .htaccess file and your URLs will change.
Note: I highly recommend this doing before you actually start your blog and you should avoid changing the structure later on as search engines will have your sites crawled and all old sites will deliver back a 404 – Note found status code
...my name is Daniel and I welcome you to my blog. I worked with Wordpress for several years now and have a strong focus on internet marketing. Here I want to share what I have learned and help you make your website better.