Optimal URL Permalink Structure for Wordpress Blogs
In case you didn’t know, Permalinks are the permanent URLs to your individual weblog posts, as well as categories and other lists of weblog posts. A permalink is what another weblogger will use to refer to your article(or section) , or how you may send a link to your story in an email message or post it on a social bookmarking site. Especially when they are used to link to individual posts, once a story is posted, the URL to it should be permanent, and never change. Hence … permalink
If you are a new beginner using WordPress, having an optimal URL structure for your blog is very important firstly because search engines love it and bring in more people to your blog. Also, once your links are linked back by the various websites out there or indexed by the search engines, it can become very difficult to change your permalink structure as they will then lead to broken 404 links.
An optimal URL structure will not have numbers or strange characters in its permalink. A permalink or the URL of the post should help the visitor decide the contents of the post better.
Here is an example of a poor URL structure for a wordpress blog:
http://www.example.com/2007/04/19/archives/p=?420
Instead, here is an example of an efficient URL structure for a wordpress blog:
http://www.example.com/category/post-title
Having such an optimal URL structure makes your blog a lot more user friendly than the default options in wordpress as shown below. More importantly, you will increase your search engine rankings as a lot of search engines give a high weight for keywords present in the URL structure.
So, how do you change the permalink structure in your wordpress blog to this optimal URL permalink structure?
In Wordpress, go to Options and then select “Permalinks”. Then, click on the “Custom, specify below” option and in the custom structure, insert “/%category%/%postname%/ “. This will make your permalinks display the cateogory of that post and the post title right after your domain name.
Many people would suggest that you go with just the post name after your domain name. While this is a good option, you can make it even better by including the category as usually all cateogories are keywords. Another benefit is that the cateogory names are automatically listed in Technorati as Tags.
Another good option for a Wordpress permalink structure is the
http://www.example.com/year/month/day/post-name
However, I think the date is not that important. Try to write timeless articles for your blog. Moreover, if you get lazy and ignore your blog for a while, say someone is searching for something on Google, even though your article might provide the answer, having a 2005/04 in the URL might make the user not click the article. So ignore the date part in the URL.
There are a lot more options in Wordpress. Following is the list of Structure Tags you can use with a Wordpress Permalink structure
%year% : The year of the post, four digits, for example 2004
%monthnum% : Month of the year, for example 05
%day% : Day of the month, for example 28
%hour% : Hour of the day, for example 15
%minute% : Minute of the hour, for example 43
%second% : Second of the minute, for example 33
%postname% : A sanitized version of the title of the post. So “This Is A Great Post!” becomes “this-is-a-great-post” in the URI
%post_id%: The unique ID # of the post, for example 423
%category%: A sanitized version of the category name. Nested sub-categories appear as nested directories in the URI.
%author% : A sanitized version of the author name.
These types of permalinks work on most systems without any problems, but there are still some conditions where problems occur.
Help !!! I have hundreds of articles in my blog and I wish to change the permalink structure without breaking any links
You need to use the Permalink Migration for a WordPress Blog using the 301 Permanent redirect. Here, using the plugin mentioned in that post, we will tell the search engines and visitors to your blog who might have bookmarked a post on your blog using the year/month/date/postname permalink structure and redirect them to the same post but with the new permalink structure. Best part, search engines love it and you also transfer your page rank to the blog post with the new permalink structure.
If you liked this article, click here to buy me a coffee!Popularity: 50% [?]
May 8th, 2010 at 7:16 am
They say that it’s a beta, something they are still fixing and changing, and renovating. So maybe blogger beta? I don’t know.
May 10th, 2010 at 3:24 am
i think “%postname%/” is better than “/%category%/%postname%/ ” because if we change category it does not create 404 error.
May 10th, 2010 at 11:41 am
Permalink parsing doesn’t check which category it is. Once it identifies the string as a category slug, it moves on, so you can freely change categories and permalink will remain.
What you can’t do is delete the category, but in this case any resource you delete generates 404s.
May 11th, 2010 at 11:47 am
I use this custom structure as well. =D
May 12th, 2010 at 11:19 am
Hi very nice post telling about Optimal URL Permalink Structure for Wordpress Blogs thanks fore great sharing.
May 13th, 2010 at 5:04 am
See the official post on the WordPress Blog for details, but the thing I’m excited about testing out is this WordPress Widgets allow you to easily rearrange and customize areas of your weblog (usually sidebars) with drag-and-drop simplicity.
June 29th, 2010 at 5:52 am
I think the words you choose to include in the URL, meta description, and page title are more important than the format of the URL. However, I have heard that keeping directories to one or two sub-directories is good and that search engines will ignore sub-directories that are greater than seven levels deep.
July 21st, 2010 at 6:05 am
Permanence in links is desirable when content items are likely to be linked to, from, or cited by a source outside the originating organization. Before the advent of large-scale dynamic websites built on database-backed content management systems…
July 23rd, 2010 at 7:58 am
At my SEO and Marketing blog I’m using the SEO mod for wordpress and for the Permalink structure I’m using, /%postname%/ and it seems to be working well!
July 24th, 2010 at 3:19 am
I intentionally leave mine off in WordPress… it seemed to make the URL too long, and for most posts the date is irrelevant.
August 10th, 2010 at 2:37 pm
Sign: wdpad Hello!!! ybwsn and 3296qykdtteksa and 2786 : I will try to recommend this post to my friends and family, cuz its really helpful.
August 31st, 2010 at 6:30 pm
/%postname%/ is better , but according to Google (Matt Cuts) it doesn’t make any difference
September 7th, 2010 at 5:53 am
The only time I’d recommend the numeric structure is if you think that your blog might someday get picked up by Google News. In that case either use the post number as the permalink…
September 7th, 2010 at 6:14 am
Hi..i am a new, to word press development. it is a Good share..thanks for useful post..
September 7th, 2010 at 6:16 am
Thanks for beautiful blog sharing all is very nice and also lovely.
September 7th, 2010 at 11:10 am
You are right about this one. Its too bad I figured this out only about a month ago. At least it is fixed now though.
September 16th, 2010 at 11:48 pm
Now with the Wordpress 3.0.1 some extra features are also added
September 17th, 2010 at 5:05 pm
Permalink parsing doesn’t check which category it is. Once it identifies the string as a category slug, it moves on, so you can freely change categories and permalink will remain.
What you can’t do is delete the category, but in this case any resource you delete generates 404s.
October 12th, 2010 at 7:40 pm
nice one
ijalab.com
October 30th, 2010 at 2:33 am
Best you should edit the webpage subject Optimal URL Permalink Structure for Wordpress Blogs | TechCounter - TechNews, Money & SEO to something more generic for your blog post you make. I enjoyed the blog post all the same.
December 6th, 2010 at 8:30 am
I was looking for some help regarding Social Engine Permalink Structures and how can we improve or change the way they show.
Any help?
December 7th, 2010 at 3:21 pm
It took me a really long time to come up with a green salad that I really like. And I think I finally found ‘my recipe’. In any raw food detox diet you really want to focus on eating as much salads as possible. It’s the most common mistakes most new.
February 7th, 2011 at 6:27 pm
I’ve read several good stuff here. Definitely worth bookmarking for revisiting. I wonder how much effort you put to make such a fantastic informative site.
April 30th, 2011 at 8:37 pm
nice post….very useful…
January 18th, 2012 at 1:06 am
Magnificent beat ! I wish to apprentice while you amend your website, how could i subscribe for a weblog site? The account helped me a acceptable deal. I had been tiny bit acquainted of this your broadcast offered brilliant transparent concept
January 25th, 2012 at 11:55 pm
Can u give me the exact structure of the google algorithm. Because i had read in an article tat google had reversed the structure for 2012 PR update….