Technofriends

If you are not aware about Wordpress’s Permalink Structure, this post will help you understand what it is and how you can optimize your Search Engine Optimization strategy for your Wordpress Blog by setting up correct permalink structure.

Permalink in Wordpress refers to the structure of the URL visible to the end user. In order to have a permalink structure of your choice, your web server (Apache) should support mod_rewrite module. This is also part of the important questions to ask before you sign up for a Web hosting provider.

The permalink structure of your blog is also something another blogger or user will use to link to your post.In Wordpress, you can navigate to the Permalinks settings by clicking through Settings –> Permalinks.

1.) Default Permalink in Wordpress is of the form http://example.com/?p=N where N is the Post ID number. It works on all server environments, but it doesn’t look as nice as some of the other options.

2.) It is important to understand that the Default Permalink structure of Wordpress is not “search engine friendly” and impacts your Wordpress blog’s search engine optimization strategy. You must modify the Permalink structure to a structure which brings more clarity to what to expect in the page.

3.) You can either select from some pre-defined permalink structures ( which are more “search engine friendly” as compared to the default permalink structure which just shows a query string called “id” with some numeric value.

4.) One of the best permalink structure from Wordpress SEO perspective is a custom structure /%category%/%postname%/. In order to use this custom structure, select the radio custom structure and enter /%category%/%postname%/ in the input box. This structure, in my opinion is the best structure from search engine optimization perspective of your wordpress blog because it contains the “post title” and “category” only ( which is most important for search engines) and also keeps your URL short and readable.

5.) It is important to understand that once you have gone live with your wordpress blog, do not change the Permalink structure. If you wish to change the permalink structure to a more Wordpress SEO friendly structure, you must follow the steps as mentioned below.Changing the permalink structure without following the steps below will lead to 404 ( File Not Found) errors on your blog ( for all the traffic which comes to “old urls”).

It is important to understand, that once you modify the permalink structure of your wordpress blog, the mod_rewrite rules are modified, leading to issues with old URLs. However, there is a way to deal with this situation and still keep on honoring the old URL’s which were generated using the previously enforced permalink structure.

6.) If you wish to modify your permalink structure and still honor the URL’s of the old permalink structure, you can do so using Dean’s Permalinks Migration plugin. With this plugin, you can send a 301 redirect to a new permalink page for any user ( be it a spider / bot or a human user) asking for the old permalink page.

The plugin takes in the old permalink structure as the input ( after you have installed it).

Once you have installed, activated and configured the plugin, you can go ahead and setup the new permalink structure. Dean’s permalink migration plugin will ensure that the end user gets a 301 instead of a 404. The above process ( mentioned here in point 6) is referred to as Safely Migrating Permalink structure in Wordpress.

As 301 refers to Permanently Moved redirection, search engines are able to quickly update their index and will then send any new traffic to the new permalink structure page.

The above points can help you understand what a permalink structure is all about and how you can modify your permalink structure to carry out Search Engine Optimization (SEO) on your Wordpress Blog.

By the way, while on the topic of search engine optimization and wordpress blogs, its important to note that for your SEO strategy to be complete, you also have proper ALT tags for your images. You might want to use SEO Friendly Images plugin to do this quickly. Read about it in my earlier article titled, Update All Images with proper ALT and TITLE Attributes using SEO Friendly Images

If you are planning to get your Wordpress blog setup, you can get it for free by going through the offer from Technofriends which helps you get your Wordpress blog setup for FREE. Read more about it here.

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