Good Blog URLs – Tips For SEO-Friendly Permalinks

While WordPress may be the your platform of choice, the question of whether you have good blog URLs never really gets old. That’s right, SEO can be quite illogical at times, but it is what it is. If you want Google to place your higher on the search engine rankings pages (SERPs), you need to get in-sync with these tips for SEO-friendly permalinks for your posts, pages, and everything else.If you were to look at the top three things that bloggers love most, you would probably get to see comments, WordPress and Adsense clicks, in that very order. Honestly speaking, it’s the same for me.

But what we don’t get to read often is how every single one of them grappled with getting their blog to feature high on search engines. The desperation to get more readership isn’t just about getting hits and pageviews. After all wouldn’t you want to see your efforts recognized and appreciated?

While this isn’t 2005, when the whether your permalinks that Google liked make a real difference, let’s just say that is does matter a little. Since it hardly takes any time to make these changes, one may as well do them and hope to see some  extra traffic coming his/her way.

Optimizing your URLs is one of the first things that you should do with your blog, since it changes the way every post, page, category, etc is displayed to everybody from users to Google. If you decide to change the structure of your links, then there’s a good chance that you will see a major drop in your current rankings, whatever they may be.

All permanent URLs of posts, archives, tag pages and almost every page in WordPress can be classified as permalinks.

Types of Permalinks

• Pretty

These can be read to know what topic the Blog Post speaks of. They use mod_rewrite to redirect to the corresponding PostID.

• Almost-Pretty

They are quite similar to their “pretty” counterparts except that it includes index.php between the URL of the site and the Permalink.

• Hackable

These are also similar to their “pretty” counterpart. The URL here comprises partitions where it can be broken to move to a different page.

• Ugly

They use PostID. You can remember the PostID and referring will be become easier. But the link gives no idea of the content in the page.

After reading this, if you feel that you need to change your URL structure settings, then you can do it by going in the WordPress Admin panel, then Settings and then Permalinks panel. You can either choose from some already existing permutations, or make your own one. To define your own structure, you must go into Custom Option. Here, you will be using Structure Tags.

Structure Tags

• %second%- Second(related to time)
• %minute%- Minute
• %hour%- Hour
• %day%- Day
• %monthnum%- Month
• %year%- Year of the article, which must be in four digits.
• %postname%- Post Slug
• %category%- Category Slug
• %post_id%- ID of Post
• %author%- Name of the author
• %tag%- Tag Slug

SEO-Friendly URLs For Blogs

While we have seen all the available options, not all of them will help you with getting more money blogging. Here are some of the structures that I believe are effective when considering being successful with getting traffic from search engines:

1)/%postname%

The URL is short and tells what the content is about. It is great for search engine optimization as it also carries the keywords. And you also can’t move to other pages by breaking down the link.

2)/%year%/%postname%

This one is pretty, hackable and also informative to the users as well as engines. One can also go to the yearly or monthly archives by simply removing the post details from the link. It informs the search crawlers about the keywords and the year of the article.

3)/%category%/%postname%

It is without a doubt the best structure when considering SEO. Beware though – you may lose your ranking if you change the Tag Slug or the Category Slug. And if you have two or more categories or tags, this combination will not be of much benefit.

That concludes this guest post about good blog URLs for maximum SEO benefits. Do let me know what you think about SEO-friendly permalinks in the comments below.