WordPress SEO Friendly Permalinks

WordPress has a number of very useful search engine friendly features built-in it’s extremely comprehensive system that has allowed it to move away from being solely a blogging platform to an advanced content management system preferred by the majority of today’s web designers and developers.

One of these many search engine friendly features is the option to set your own permalinks (a URL that points to a blog entry after it has passed from the front page to the archives). WordPress has given Permalinks it’s own section under the settings tab in the admin panel – Settings > Permalinks.

On this configuration page you can select between five options:

• Default:
  http://www.exampledomain.co.uk/?p=123
• Day and name:
  http://www.exampledomain.co.uk/2010/07/06/sample-post/
• Month and name:
  http://www.exampledomain.co.uk/2010/07/sample-post/
• Numeric:
  http://www.exampledomain.co.uk/archives/123
• Custom Structure

Unfortunately none of the top 4 are particularly search engine friendly as ideally the url should not display numbers but instead relevant keywords relating to that article or page.

The Fix

We can combat this by checking the Custom Structure option and adding the following tags in it’s text field:

/%category%/%postname%/

This will now insert the category names and post titles into the URLs on your WordPress website to look like this:

http://www.exampledomain.co.uk/examplecategory/examplepost

Enjoy.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 6th, 2010 at 11:14 am and is filed under Blogging, Wordpress. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.