Every WebMaster or Blog Owner wants more and more traffic coming from Search Engines. Every Blogger will try hard to maintain the quality content with nice descriptive Categories which allow Search Engines to crawl the Websites and keep up the high ranking. A Search Engine Friendly URL Structure will definitely boost up the better rankings.
When WordPress is installed by default the URL structure is like “http://ursite.com/?p=N” Where “N” is the Post ID like 123, 345 etc. and doesn’t look nice and very hard to remember and revisiting the site. IF the URL is made of words related to the content of the post instead of ugly default structure it would be easier to remember for visitors and most importantly useful for Search Engines with more information. Such Words in URLs can be seen highlighted or bold in search results.
WordPress.com users need not to worry in this case as their Blog’s URL Structure is well SEOed by WordPress. WordPress.Org users can make their URL Structure by Using Permalinks. One can select one of the three options provided by WordPress or we can choose a Custom Structure.
The options at Permalink Settings are;
Day and name http://ursite.com/2009/02/28/sample-post/
Month and name http://ursite.com/2009/02/28/sample-post/
Numeric http://ursite.com/archives/123
Custom Structure <Will be a blank, need to be filled as per our choice>
We can select one of the options or can use or own customized Structure. We can customize like;
http://ursite.com/Category/PostTitle
http://ursite.com/Year/month/day/PostTitle
http://ursite.com/postTitle
And this can be achieved by typing the below code in the Custom Structure
/%category/%postname%/
/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/
/%postname%/ etc.
We tested many customized Structures for my websites and for my Clients Websites. Some of them are;
“/Category/Postname”
“/YYYY/MM/DD/PostName”
“/Category/PostName”
“/YYYY/MM/DD/Category/Postname”
To test the results with the Search Engines. The test results always varied for different Websites. For one of the websites which I worked for was an Employment website which gives the Vacancies to Job Seekers started working fine when we tested with the structure as “/YYYY/MM/DD/Category/Postname-post-id”. (Post-id is a unique numeric id created by wordpress, which can be helpful for news sites to feature their posts in some News Aggregators) Prior to that we tested with “Category/PostName”, “YYYY/MM/DD/PostName” etc. And for a Student Information Site “Category/Post-Name” Worked great.
For another Sales Site it Could be “Category/Postname” suffice to feature in first page of a search. It is always better to test your site with different Permalink structures to milk the best results out of Search Engines. So Please share your experiences with Permalinks which would be a great help for me and other novice bloggers.
More Information to set your Permalinks can obtained from http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks
