What Is the Best Permalink Structure in WordPress?
Posted by Nile | Posted in WordPress | Posted on 02-18-2010 | 5 Comments
Tags: permalink, seo
A lot of people who are into search engine optimization vary on this. Personally I use /%postname%/ and set it up for my own clients. Why?
It is easy and contains the keywords necessary for the optimal search. I am not known as an expert, but I have built quite a few sites that have improved well through ranking. I believe this has been the best. I know there are people that like %postname%.html and /%category%/%postname%/.
Why is it not as great to put the date or category in the URL structure?
Well, you are telling the search engine that the day and the category are more important than the article itself. For those who write tutorials and helpful topics, it is not the date or category that people are looking for in the search engine.
The great thing about WordPress is that is is easy to choose a custom structure and while posting, you can have a page slug that sums up the article, while the actual post name is longer. A lot of times this is to focus on keywords.
By the way, I really think that if you have not, you should check out Matt Cutt’s article Straight from Google: What You Need to Know. If you noticed, Matt Cutts uses a post name structure, but he also utilizes custom slugs where his URL path contains keywords the sums up his post, and his title is different. The article contains a slide show and video too. Another person I recommend that has a lot of experience is Joost de Valk.
What permalink structure do you use for your website and why? Any SEO tips for WordPress users?
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I personally use something very similar to yours…the permalink structure I use is:
%postname%.html
I think the search engines like the .html at the end.
What do you think?
.-= Top Free WordPress Themes´s last blog ..My-Stream WordPress Theme =-.
I really do not think it makes much of a difference. However, I noticed since I changed my structure on my main blog to the /%postname%/ I have gotten a lot more traffic that is not random or spambots.
I often use %postname%.html
I don’t think the .html part makes much difference on SEO though(?), just a way to seperat posts from pages
The best SEO is probably to write great content
It also the hardest part I think – at least for myself.
.-= Mattias Wirf´s last blog ..Translating with PoEdit =-.
I agree with you. As they say…usually “Content is King”
I’ve developed a number of different websites over the years and used WordPress extensively across a few of them, and I think it’s a good idea to include both the post name but also the category in the permalink structure to aid SEO.
So I use /%category%/%postname%/ as my permalink structure and then make sure I get the best from that by using the excellent “All In One SEO” plugin to promote it.