Permalink Structure

When ever we talk about SEO of any site, permalink plays major role in overall optimization. A permalink is Permanent link of your page and posts and it doesn’t change with time. By default WordPress offer permalink like this:

http://tropicana.freevision.me/?p=123

Which is not search engine friendly, they miss out optimizing WordPress permalink for SEO. In this guide, I will be talking about which permalink structure is the best and will also look into other suggested WordPress permalink structure and why you should avoid them.

Which Permalink Structure is recommended for SEO?

One of the major On page SEO factor is having your Keyword in your post URL (Permalink). Default WordPress permalink is non SEO friendly and when you Install WordPress for the first time and start blogging without making any change, you are blogging with a non SEO friendly permalink structure.

You can find various Permalink settings under WordPress dashboard > Settings > Permalink and few suggested permalink structures are:

  • Domain.com/Category/Post-name
  • Domain.com/Postname (/%postname%/)
  • Domain.com/postname/numeric-ID

WordPress Permalink for Google News:

If you are running a news based site for example current affairs, Bollywood news, Technology news kind of site, you need to have 3 digit unique ID in your permalink as mentioned in Google news submission requirement.

Some time back Matt Cutts, Google Engineer also changed his WordPress blog permalink structure to domain.com/post-name and here is an explanation from him:

Though he didn’t mentioned any thing directly about SEO benefits of using simple WordPress permalink, but he did mentioned about such permalink helps in keeping thing simple.

Take away and other Permalink SEO Tips:

  • Use Simple permalink (domain.com/postname)
  • Prefer dashes over underscore (Source)
  • Remove stop words from permalink like (Is, are)
  • Never change Permalink after publishing & if you do, setup a 301 redirection from old to new URL using .htaccess
  • Use your Keyword in Permalink