Search Engine Optimization with WordPress Permalinks
OK here is a video and a guide to optimizing your permalinks in WordPress for optimal SEO benefits! We are going to teach you some basic CRITICAL WordPress on page SEO that YOU MUST DO if you want to get good page ranking with the search engines OK? Search Engine Optimization is required if you want Google to rank your pages so people see them when they search for information. For more on SEO and Search Engine Optimization you can click on this link to read our article about the SEO Plugin SEOPressor.
What is a Permalink and why should I care?
Permalinks are the permanent URLs to your individual weblog posts, as well as categories and other lists of weblog postings. A Permalink is what another weblogger will use to link to your article (or section), or how you might send a link to your story in an e-mail message. The URL to each post should be permanent, and never change — hence Permalink. In this WordPress the Permalink SEO Guide we ant to teach you how these permalinks can be used to Optimize your site for On Page SEO and Google! In addition having keywords and synonyms or in your title AND IN YOUR URL gets you better rankings with Google.
That is why you should care!
Here is a very good video on WordPress Permalinks:
Choosing your Permalink structure
NOTE: IF YOU CHANGE YOUR PERMALINK STRUCTURE IT WILL CHANGE THE PERMALINKS, THE URLS, TO ALL YOUR WEB PAGES AND LINKS GOING TO YOUR OLD PAGES WILL NO LONGER WORK! So it is best to set up the permalinks structure when you first create a website OR only once, and if it is important enough to justify either the work of redirecting all the old url's to the new url's OR losing the page ranking and backlinks to all your pages!
In this guide we want to show you how to change your Permalink structure to the best possible.
To Change your permalinks:
- Go to the Settings tab on the left hand side of your WordPress Admin Panel.
- Click on the Permalinks entry
- The permalinks Settings page will be displayed as seen in the picture further below.
WordPress the Permalink SEO Guide Tip: You never, ever put your site url in the permalinks slot. You must use one of the structure tags, or a combination of tags only.
To activate PATHINFO permalinks, start your Permalink structure with index.php/.
What is the best Permalink structure for SEO??
Having written this WordPress the Permalink SEO Guide My vote would go to the following although I myself do not use the Category in my Permalink structure/ If You do I would try to make sure that my category names were keywords that I was targeting:
The difference between this version and the custom structure given above is that at the end of permalinks the “.html” extension will be added.
There is a belief among many that this will make the post appear 1 level higher to the search engine crawlers and therefor be given more authority and it makes it look more like a static HTML page which search engines will craw, more often in theory.
What are the best WordPress Permalink Plugins?
There are 2 WordPress Permalink plugins that I recommend:
1) html on pages plugin. This will add the html to the end of your static pages. Works great. I use it on some of my blogs.
2) The "Advanced Permalinks" Plugin will help to include the .html extension on your category pages.
Authors bio is coming up shortly.