Permalink Optimization

What are Permalinks?

Permalinks are simply speaking “the butt” of your urls. Whenever you create and publish a post or a page it creates a url for that post, the part that goes after the domain name is what is called the Permalink.

Take the following domain for example:

http://www.wpexplorer.com/what-are-permalinks.html

The Permalink would be:

what-are-permalinks.html

In WordPress you may have also heard the term “slugs”, which is basically the same thing as the permalink. But from my understanding the Slug would not include the .html (please correct me if I am wrong).

Permalink Importance to SEO

Permalinks are important to SEO because much like the domain itself it is the perfect place for you to add keywords.

Search engines uses your url permalinks and the title of your pages and posts as part of the information gathering when indexing your site. By having the same keywords in both your posts and pages will gain more importance.

Simply speaking, permalinks add credibility that the url actually reflects the content of the page.

Permalinks in WordPress

By default the url of a wordpress posts looks something like this:

http://aoclarkejr.com/?p=25

What your URL should look like is this:

http://aoclarkejr.com/permalink-optimization.html

Permalink Structure Alternatives

Most people use one of the 2 following permalink structures:

/%category%/%postname%/

/%postname%/

I tend to use %postname%.html for the following SEO reasons:

  1. I do not index category pages to avoid duplicate content so I do not need to specify the categoy
  2. Sometimes categories contain keywords that are irrelevant to your post
  3. I like to keep it short and Sweet
  4. The .html makes my posts “look” like pages rather than posts.

How to Optimize Permalinks

Optimizing your permalinks is actually very easy.

  1. Log into your WordPress Admin Panel
  2. Head over to Settings-Permalinks
  3. Select custom structure and type in the following: %postname%.html

permalinks-1

permalinks-2

Important Note

Make sure you optimize your Permalinks when you first create your site or blog. If you already have a bunch of pages indexed by search engines, changing the permalinks will create a lot of “Not Found” pages.

If you decide to optimize your WordPress permalinks on a blog that already has multiple indexed pages, just make sure you re-direct the old urls to the new ones.


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