SEO-Friendly WordPress Blog Permalinks

Permalinks are the permanent URLs of your individual blog posts in WordPress. This include your URLs to your categories, tags and archive listings. By default, WordPress permalinks are ugly and NOT SEO-friendly. Because WordPress permalinks are dynamic and are formatted like any common PHP-based site, it uses page and post ID’s rather than actual keywords. Of course, as people knowledgeable of SEO, we wanted the keywords to be used instead. So how do we go about making the permalinks SEO-friendly.

Modifying Permalinks To Be SEO-Friendly

The good news is, modifying the structure of your permalinks to make it SEO-friendly is very simple. It only needs a few modifications from the administration panel of your WordPress blog. Moreover, WordPress now allows you to further improve the permalinks of each of your post directly from your post editor.

From your WordPress dashboard, you’ll find a link to your PERMALINKS under SETTINGS. Click on it and you will be directed to your permalink setting, which you can then configure to make it SEO-friendly.

From your permalink settings, you will find five choices under your common settings (Default, Day and Name, Month and Name, Numeric, and Common Structure). Tick common structure and enter this code:

/%postname%.html

Another suggested permalink structure would be to include the category of the post, in which case, you can use the following permalink code.

/%category%/%postname%.html

Remove Irrelevant Words In Your Permalink

A common practice in SEO is to remove irrelevant words in your permalink. SEO experts believe that the keywords in the permalink are weighted based on the number of words in the permalink. The more words the permalink contain, the less will be the keyword weight of each keyword and hence lower will be its relevancy in a search.

Once you have a custom permalink which is automatically assigned to your post using the title you provided, you can edit the assigned permalink by clicking on the edit button as shown below.

Edit the permalinks and remove any unnecessary connecting words like is, are, at, by, in etc. Keep the post title descriptive and self-explanatory for the readers and the permalinks short for the Search Engines. But do not stuff the permalinks with keywords alone. Make sure that anyone who reads the permalink gets an idea of what the post is about.