SEO Friendly URLs for WordPress (Permalinks)

As promised in my last post, I will now teach you guys how to actually rank for the long-tailed keywords using wordpress. As we all know that Google actually looks at the url for the keyword as well as the page-title. So it is very possible that the site with the url that has the keyword will rank higher.

To show you that google does count the url

Now having that said you definately need to get your blogs url to show keywords in it to rank high and pick up some good long-tail keywords.

By Default your wordpress blog comes with

< http://example.com/?p=N > This sort of structure where N is the number specified to the item in mysql. This is completely non-seo friendly because it is not static. Whatever you do you need to get rid of this one.

[raw]/%category%/%postname%/[/raw]

Balkhis is running on the above permalink structure. What does that do? Well for instance when i posted about the Ultimate Promotion Technique the url was something like this

www.balkhis.com/advertising/ultimate-promotion-technique/

It have the category name and the post title. Which resutled me to rank first for the keyword in google.

Ultimate promotion technique

Now this is just one way to get SEO Friendly Permanlink structure in wordpress and my favorite way by the way.

There are multiple other ways you can do it. Another good technique I used was when i was making a more static content site with wordpress. My designing firm Uzzz Productions, Yes even though it doesn’t look like it … It is powered by WordPress.

I used the same structure as Balkhis, but just added .html in the end so it became something like this:

[raw]/%category%/%postname%.html[/raw]

Which makes my post pages seem like that they are static pages.

http://www.uzzz.net/wordpress-templates/lupon-adsense-ready-free-wordpress-theme.html

Now this is just a trick and you can play it many different ways showed on the official wordpress page

Here are some of the tags you can use in making your own permalink structure

%year% – The year of the post, four digits, for example 2004

%monthnum% – Month of the year, for example 05

%day% – Day of the month, for example 28

%hour% – Hour of the day, for example 15

%minute% – Minute of the hour, for example 43

%second% – Second of the minute, for example 33

%postname% – A sanitized version of the title of the post (post slug field on Edit Post/Page panel). So “This Is A Great Post!” becomes this-is-a-great-post in the URI (see note below)

%post_id% – The unique ID # of the post, for example 423

%category% – A sanitized version of the category name (category slug field on New/Edit Category panel). Nested sub-categories appear as nested directories in the URI.

%author% – A sanitized version of the author name.

Now once you have decided which permalink structure you are going to be using… All you have to do is login to your wordpress admin panel.

Go to the menu Options > Permalinks

Select the field Custom, Specify below

Paste your permalink structure there, and click the button on the bottom of the page called Update Permalink Structure.

It will give you a small .htaccess code in the text field at the bottom, copy that code and paste it in your .htaccess file for your blog, and you are good to go.

Good luck ranking for the long-tail keywords and get some good traffic.