Organic traffic (traffic from search engine) is cheap and ever green source of traffic. Its important for a blog to properly optimize URL structure for SEO purpose from very start of blog because by doing so, your site will attract more traffic and readers.
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Search engine gives high SEO ranking in SERP to the sites that have optimized permalink instead of numbers and other characters. Examples of non-optimized URL is;
Because it has been observed that search engines give high weightage for keywords that are present in URL. Wordpress provides various option to define structure based on year & month however you have vast choice for selection of permalink. Some prefer to include category name, year to be included.
While I prefer simple yet search engine friendly permalink structure which you might have observed.
SEO Best Practices
Follow these tips while deciding permalink structure for your blog.
- Select static URL structure instead of dyamic URL,
- Use minimum number of words in URL
- Try to use keywords in start of URL
- Try to limit the number of directories for SEO purpose. Because you are pushing your keywords in the end.
- Don’t change permalink structure. If change is unavoidable use plugin to safely change permalinks.
- In my opinion, don’t use categories in structure, it will allow to rearranging/renaming categories in future.
- Use dashes instead of underscores.
- Use Clean SEO Slug plugin. It will remove unnecessary words from URL to make it short and SEO friendly.
If you want to customize the structure, all you need to click permalink in wordpress control panel and select custom structure. Here you can define valid tags in custom field.
Carefully select permalink structure for your blog, because changing it later will cause broken links which is not liked by Google.
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{ 20 comments… read them below or add one }
I think the best permalink structure is %postname% rather than %category%/%postname% since if anything happens in your blog and your categories are deleted or you need to change categories then if you are using the latter it will certainly cause problems. I did not understand this before and used category/postname and I fear if anything wrong happens with the categories I will have to suffer
I endorse your argument and thats why i recommended not to use category name in URL structure. Thanks for your reading.
Thats an awesome article about the URL and SEO
I am very happy we are following whatever you have explained here buddy 
One more point. Your URL should be less than 65 letters. Then only it adds some advantage
Thanks for sharing
Very True, thats why i suggested not to include directories/categories name in URL. Some people include their blog title in Post title, that should also be avoided. Let the Google to show important keywords in start. Thanks Vinay for your valuable comments.
Adding a Post title to url is adds lot of advantage buddy
E.g. see my latest post about Fishbowl. The post title is ” Fishbowl – Facebook Desktop Application by Microsoft” and same is my URL.
this adds lot advantage when I am submitting my post to Twitter and google, as they even look at the URL for keywords
With in 65 character limit, you can add anything that relates to your post. But there is another way to get this thing around. We have two type of titles. Post title and meta title. Draft your post title according to article , like in your referred article, select “Microsoft Developed Desktop Application for Facebook” while in meta title you can write about fishbowl e.g “Fishbowl a desktop application for FB by Microsoft” or what ever. So you option to divert more traffic by this optimization. What you say?
Great tips Imran! I forgot to thank-you for sharing this information with me a while back. It has definitely made a difference.
Thanks Kevin for your reading. I am glad if my work help you and anybody. You still have blog title in your posts’ URL. Try to remove them, and if you can’t remove them keep your keywords in start of post+URL so that they are more visible to search engine.
i really helps in seo. and also when a person looks at a url he feels more confident that he’ll get the required result
Yeah, that’s great, but, will it become problem when we have a long long post name?
Try to keep your post name within 65 characters. Title longer than this will not take benefit but you still have way to overcome this problem. Try to keep your keywords in start of post. Use All-In-One SEO for best SEO results, It gives you character counting as well for title and meta description.
“In my opinion, don’t use categories in structure, it will allow to rearranging/renaming categories in future”
I second your statement.
I tend to choose more than one categories for my post, and guess what? It’ll mess up my sitemap page.
Hmm I can understand the bloggers who have selected categories in their URL structure, they have no option to change the site navigation. And one more thing as you said, using multiple categories in a post spoiled sitemap page, its better to exclude categories form your sitemap to minimize the chances of Duplicate content.
the first thing i do before google indexes my blog is turn it to postname.html structure , it worked best. Thanks to harsh from shoutmeloud for coming up with this tip [almost a year ago]
Dot html URL structure is Google friendly and preferred more. I also learned this tip from Harsh. He is great blogger.
Great article – really useful for the SEO newbie and old pros alike. We’ve written a brief guide on best practices for url structure which goes well with this article – hopefully, it will help people to get their site set up in the best possible way best practices in url structure for best seo performance. Thanks again for sharing.
Thanks for sharing! Great information!
Good post and very useful information has been shared. I have a questions though. As mat (from Google) says, you should have 4-5 words in the URL, does that includes the domain name too. Or we should have 4-5 words in the URL excluding domain names?
4-5 should be fine.
Currently i have set wordpress permalink to default,is it is fine or should i change it to %POSTNAME%.
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