Make Your WordPress Permalinks SEO-Friendly

May 27, 2009 // Author: Jacob Stoops // 94 views // View Comments
Make Your WordPress Permalinks SEO-Friendly
Quick tips to help you make your Wordpress permalink structure more SEO-friendly.

Permalinks are the permanent URLs to your individual blog posts, as well as categories and archives listings.

Basically, permalinks is just a fancy word for the URL that get’s created when you make a post on your WordPress blog. By default, WordPress permalinks are not very SEO-friendly.

WordPress permalinks are dynamic and are formatted like any common PHP-based site. That is, with page and post ID’s rather than actual keywords. Although your site will still index, from an SEO-perspective it is much better to try to find a way to get keywords in the URL.

So how do I change it? Modifying the structure of your permalinks is pretty simple. You only have to make some slight modifications within the administration panel of your blog.

The Default Permalink Structure

Here is how to URL’s will look when you initially set up your WordPress blog.

http://www.agent-seo.com/?p=123

Pretty much any option that you choose is better for SEO than leaving the default settings.

Your Other Options

Right now, WordPress gives you 4 additional options for structuring your permalinks:

SEO-Friendly WordPress Permalinks

* The custom structure will be blank by default.

The SEO-Friendly Option

I recommend using the ‘Custom Structure’. Why, you ask?

You could use either the ‘Day and name’ or ‘Month and name’ and be fine, however having the numbers in the URL is a valuable waste of space and is unnecessary for SEO.

The ‘Numeric’ structure is almost as bad as the default structure, therefore I don’t recommend it.

If used correctly, the ‘Custom Structure’ is the most SEO-Friendly. This structure gets rid of all the numbers and simply uses keywords, which are specified by your Post Title & Category/Archives Titles.

SEO-Friendly WordPress Permalinks

How to Do It?

Click ‘Settings’ then ‘Permalinks’. In there Custom Structure Field, paste the following:

/%category%/%postname%/

This will give you the SEO-Friendly permalink structure that should really make some of your pages pop in the rankings.

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  • Great Article. My first experience w/ Permalinks was not a good one, wish I had your tutorial back then. Might want to also let people know that after you make the change they need to sit back for a few minutes before the changes take effect. Thanks.
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