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SEO Friendly URLs to Improve your Search Engine Results

I can’t believe that nowadays some people are still using the default WordPress permalink structure. Unfortunately, it still happens from time to time that I run into a blog with this kind of permalink structure. By default WordPress uses dynamic URLs made of the blog domain followed by the unique post ID. For example, yesterday’s post about Shoemoney System default link would be: http://dukeo.com/?p=686

deep-link

Back in the days, Google and other search engines had difficulties indexing this kind of permalink structure. However, search engines have highly improved and it’s not a problem anymore. But, with dynamic permalinks, Google doesn’t know the content of the page without visiting it.

On the other hand, with Search Engine Friendly permalinks, Google have an idea about the content of a page before visiting it. It also adds some SEO value through the fact that the urls does contain some keywords which are relevant to the page.

Activating search engine friendly permalinks is just a matter of a few clicks with WordPress. You need to visit Settings then Permalinks. On this page you can select from several options: Default, Day and name, Month and name, Numeric and Custom.

I would advise you to either use a date-based permalink structure or a custom structure. For example, on Dukeo I am using a custom structure: /%postname%/. Just test a few and decide which one you prefer.

Tip: If you didn’t change your permalink structure from the very beginning, in order to keep the Google love that your pages already won, you need to make sure that your Old permalinks are redirected to your New permalinks. There are several wordpress plugins to redirect permalink structure.

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Sté Kerwer
Post written by: Sté Kerwer
Bonjour from France. My name is Stéphane Kerwer and Dukeo.com is my blog. I do most of the heavy lifting in here but from time to time, you may see some guest posts. If you wish to receive updates about Dukeo, subscribe to RSS Feed, follow Dukeo on twitter or become a fan on Facebook.
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5 Comments

  1. As far as seo goes with Google, Yahoo and MSN, do you think it’s better to have just the site url followed by the “postname” permalink structure or the category followed by the postname?

    • Well, based only on SEO, I think that the best permalink structure would be: domain.com/category/postname/.

      You might wonder why I am not using this structure and the reason is that to use this structure, your categories need to be well-planed. Once your post is assigned to a category, you can’t change it without losing your positions on Search Engines.

      By setting it to domain.com/postname/ I can easily edit my categories without consequences for the SEO of each post.

  2. Indeed, it’s crazy that people still did not get the very basics of seo…

  3. I wouldn’t advise anyone to use date-based links because it prevents you from recycling your content…

  4. /%postname%/ FTW! This is by far the best permalink structure for both SEO and practical use.

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