WordPress Permalinks Explained

Written by Stefan Vervoort on March 6, 2008

We all would like to rank high in Google and other search engines. Most of the bloggers out there use the weblog software WordPress, which is a great search engine friendly based piece of software. Your theme has been optimized for the search engines and your pages show up. What you want and need is more visitors clicking through when they see your title and link. We aren’t discussing the titles today, but the link. This guide will help you creating quality permalinks in a minute.

What is a permalink?

Well, how should I explain permalinks. The best way should be with a example.

http://www.divitodesign.com/2008/03/how-you-should-write-quality-permalinks/

The colored and underlined part of the whole URL is the permalink. The other part is just the domain. Everything that is typed after the domain is your permalink.

Why is this permalink important?

A quality permalink is important because it could give you a couple extra keywords and therefore improve your ranking. In the results keywords are bolded. Look below for an example (search query; Overflow CSS)

As you can see; the green URL has a bolded area as well. This means the words in the URL are also counted as keywords. Conclusion: Google thinks keywords in permalinks can be used to improve your visibility in search engines.

When I look at my own search behavior, I usually look for the title and look how many parts of the entry are bolded. How more, how faster I click the link. Those extra keywords in the URL are going to help you improve to guide the searchers onto YOUR web page.

Many of you are using WordPress and guess what: The options to change your default permalink exists.

Ready? Set. Go!

This guide has been written when using WordPress version 2.1.3. Future versions of WordPress shouldn’t change much in the approach.

1. Log in to your AdminCP.
2. Select Options
3. Select “Permalinks”
4. Take a look at the image below. You should select the “Custom, specify below” radio button:

permalink2.jpg

As you can see, my permalinks are built on the /year/month/post principle.

5. Type the tags you’d like included in your permalink. More tags can be found on the WordPress permalinks page.

You do not only improve your search engine visibility with this SEO trick, you will also improve your accessibility. Your users know exactly where they are when they take a short look at the URL. Quality permalinks are better than the WordPress’ default ?p=123 ones. Now you understand you have an important task to do to improve search engine results placement, as well as guiding those searchers to your website.

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This article is written by:

Name: Stefan Vervoort

URL: http://www.divitodesign.com

Description: I am a 18-year-old webdesigner and blogger from Waalwijk, the Netherlands. I also blog at WPTOY and work at DivitoMedia.

3 Responses

  1. Free gadgets says:
    January 25, 2009 at 7:13 pm

    hmm.. thanks i didn’t know what these were before. Thanks for sharing.

  2. WordPress Resources: The Ultimate Collection » DivitoDesign says:
    February 8, 2009 at 5:51 pm

    [...] Wordpress Permalinks Explained [...]

  3. Wei Liang | Earn Money Online says:
    February 10, 2009 at 7:12 am

    Permalink structure is indeed important in search engine optimization. However, isn’t it better to keep permalinks as close to the domain name as possible.

    Instead of using domain.com/year/month/title-post, isnt it better to use domain.com/title-post ?