When considering vital aspects of the SEO of any web site, the permalink plays major role in overall optimisation. A permalink may be a permanent link of your page and posts, and it doesn’t change with time. By default, WordPress offers permalinks like this:
http://kbtexperts.com/?p=123
The Permalink Settings Page Explained
In WordPress, links are called Permalinks (short for permanent links). You’ll see the term permalink structure and URL structure being used interchangeably.
First thing you need to do is to visit the Permalinks settings page in your WordPressadmin area.
Simply click on Settings link in the admin menu and then click on Permalinks. This will take you to a page that looks like this:
As you can see there are number of choices available.
- Plain
http://www.kbtexperts.com/?p=123
- Day and name
http://www.kbtexperts.com/2016/01/22/sample-post/
- Month and name
http://www.kbtexperts.com/2016/01/sample-post/
- Numeric
http://www.kbtexperts.com/archives/123
- Post name
http://www.kbtexperts.com/sample-post/
- Custom Structure
Choose your own URL structure using available tags.
Let us explain these options a bit, and how useful they are for users and SEO.
The first option which is called plain used to be the default WordPress URL structure. This is not an SEO friendly option.
The day and name option is somewhat SEO friendly as it has the post name in it. However, with dates, the URL becomes too lengthy. But more importantly after some time your content seems outdated, even if you regularly update it. Similarly, the month and name option also runs the risk of being dated.
However if you’re a news publication, then you want to have the dates in your URL to show the recency and improve the user experience.
In our opinion, those two structures are only good for news sites. Business sites that are hoping to create ever-green content should avoid it.
Post name option is the most SEO friendly because it is short and pretty.
If you are running a larger publication, then you can use a custom structure that can also be SEO friendly.
My favorite and suggested permalink structure for a WordPress blog is Post Name. Post name permalinks are short, sweet and have nothing extra which will affect your on- page SEO score.