How to customize your WordPress Permalink to make it more SEO friendly

Posted by Jacob on Jun 29, 2010 in WordPress | 0 comments

Every blog post that you write is assigned its own Web page and the URL link (Web address) that points to that page is called a permalink or permanent link. Permalinks are permanent links to your blog posts or articles. Permalinks are commonly used in blog sites to points a specific post or article after it has passed from the front page to the archives. Basically a permalink is a URL (Uniform Resource Locator) that points or provides a link to a specific web address, post, forum, other similar article or pages online. When you publish a new post WordPress automatically creates a permalink for the post.

By default a blog post’s permalink in WordPress looks like this:

http://www.blogdomainname.com/?p=50/

In the URL or the post address p stands for post and 50 is the ID that has been assigned to that post.

Would you rather have a permalink similar to http://www.blogname.com/post_title/ ?

I bet you do.

The default permalink looks pretty ugly and search engines also don’t like them. When a search engine sends its crawler to your page to gather information about the post, default permalink doesn’t describe anything about the page to the crawler.

If you are interested in a higher ranking for your website, I strongly recommend using custom permalink. By using custom permalink you can insert your targeted keywords into the URLs of your posts and pages. Keywords are very important if you want your webpage to rank well on search engine results. Search engines index your contents depending on the keywords and people use keywords to look for contents. Default permalink contains no keywords of worth.

Fortunately WordPress lets you customize the permalink.

To customize your permalink click Permalinks in the setting menu in your WordPress “Administration Panel”.

Four common Permalink settings are already created for you. You can either choose any of them or make your own.

Default: The ugly permalinks. WordPress assigns an ID number to each blog post and creates the Default link

http://www.domain_name.com/?p=50

Day and name: For this format WordPress Generates a permalink that includes the year, month, day and the post title

http://www.domain_name/2010/01/01/post_title

Months and name: For this format WordPress Generates a permalink that includes the year, month and the post title

http://www.domain_name/2010/01/post_title

Numeric: WordPress assigns a numeric value to the permalink.

http://www.domain_name.com/archives/007

Customizing your permalink structure:

If you would like to customize your own permalinks without choosing the above pre structured formats then check the Permalink Tags below and I will explain how you can create your own permalink format using the Tags.

Permalink Tags	Output
%year%	4-digit year (example 2010)
%monthnum%	2-digit month (example April as 04 )
%day%	2-digit day (example 01)
%hour%	2-digit hour (example 3 pm as 15)
%minute%	2-digit minute (example 45)
%second%	2-digit second (example 15)
%postname%	Text- Name of the post
%post_id%	Unique ID of the post (example 511)
%category%	Text- Name of the post category
%author%	Text- Name of the Author of the post

Custom Permalink Example:

If you want to have year, month, post name, category on your post link then you use the following Tags in the Custom Structure box

/%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%/%category%/

And your link will look like

http://www.domain_name.com/2010/06/How-to-customize-your-WordPress-Permalink/WordPress/

Things to remember:

Be sure you include the slashes before the beginning of the Tags, between the Tags and end of the string of Tags.

Keep in mind that changing the structure of your permalinks in future affects the permalinks for all the post on your blog, both new and old. The reason you need to consider this because search engines use permalinks to index the posts on your site, so changing the permalink structure will make all those indexed links obsolete. It is always wise to change the permalink structure before you write your first post.