What is a WordPress Permalink Structure?
It is the structure you decide on for the URL’s of your individual blog posts. WordPress’s default structure includes a question mark and the Post ID, which would look like this:
http://wordpresssavvy.com/?p=124
By customizing your permalinks, you can make the URL or link to the same blog post look like this instead:
http://wordpresssavvy.com/124/best-wordpress-permalink-structure/
You can customise your Permalink Structure by clicking Options > Permalinks in your WordPress dashboard or admin panel.
Why is it Important?
Choosing the best WordPress Permalink structure helps your page get found in Google and if you have considered your URL carefully might increase the number of visitors who find your page.
Most SEO experts consider the having the keyword phrase that you are trying to get your page to rank for in the URL of the page is an important factor in Google’s method of ranking the search results for a given page. Therefore you are helping yourself in getting found if you include your keyword in the URL.
So what is the Best WordPress Permalink Structure?
When you go to Options > Permalinks, you will notice there are several options for setting up your Permalink Structure. The default choices are default, date and name based, numeric or custom which show as:
default: http://wordpresssavvy.com/?p=124
date & name: http://wordpresssavvy.com/2010/06/16/best-wordpress-permalink-structure/
numeric: http://wordpresssavvyz.com/archives/124
Here on WordPress Savvy I use a custom Permalink Structure that is coded like this:
/%post_id%/%postname%/
What that structure does is create URLs to individual blog posts that contain the Post ID and the Post Name. Here is an example of a permalink created using this structure:
http://wordpresssavvy.com/124/best-wordpress-permalink-structure/
As I do not want my posts organised by date then this structure makes the most sense to me because
a) it contains the keyword phrase of my post
b) it has the hidden benefit of giving me an automatic short form method of calling the page i.e. http://wordpresssavvy.com/124/ By simply using this URL I will get to the same post. I can use this in Twitter for example as my own shortened URL.
What WordPress Permalink structure do you prefer and why?
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
A good read. I’m on a very steep learning curve developing my business and website. These kind of articles help a lot.
Thanks Chris, glad it was useful.
Why do you use the id# in it as well and not just the post name?
Hi Kelly,
For three reasons:
a) You need the URL to be unique and including the id guarantees that.
b) If you are trying to optimise the page for SEO, you want your keyword to appear as early as possible in the URL and the id will only add 4 or 5 characters before it in the URL.
c) You can use the id as a shortened URL as people can get to that post just with the id.
Hope that helps.