Balkhis - Vision for success

SEO Friendly URLs for Wordpress (Permalinks)

 Mar 19, 2008  Syed Balkhi  SEO  


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

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.

/%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

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.

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11 Comments »

Comment by arief_baskoro Subscribed to comments via email
2008-04-04 21:52:56

Recently I try to install one permalink plugin to put .htm in the end of the url, but it doesn’t work in my WP 2.33. then I google for an alternative, I came up with this artikel. This really help me, I don’t know if I don’t have to install any plugin for this.
Big thanks for you Dude
:) :)


 
Comment by CodingBanter
2008-04-08 06:46:56

This article is really helpful. Thanx!


 
Comment by Puneet
2008-04-17 05:31:54

this changes shud b made while we start fresh new blog … right ?

wat if we change this to an existing blog few months old ?
right now am using “%postname%” now if i include category too then the urls will b changed … that wud b a bad idea of change for now .. right ?


Comment by Syed Balkhi
2008-04-17 08:21:07

It is really upto you Puneet. Depends on how you are doing for rankings right now. I definately say for new blogs they should go for this type of structure. Although I don’t think there is anything wrong with your structure either.


 
Comment by Angad Sodhi
2008-06-18 23:57:51

As long as you r not using ?p= and stuff, its fine. I suggest you dont change the structure now


 
 
Comment by lukmanf
2008-04-23 21:33:11

thanks balkhi, I being search for this


 
Comment by Siva Subscribed to comments via email
2008-05-14 08:32:54

I setup the perma link as you mentioned but I get 404 error when I click on the post. Is there any other change in htaccess required?


Comment by Syed Balkhi
2008-05-14 21:27:01

Not that I know off…. Really I can’t tell without seeing what is going on in your blog.


 
 
Comment by Angad Sodhi
2008-06-18 03:04:11

Great example Syed. Nice observation


 
Comment by Rakhshinda
2008-06-18 22:10:32

A really helpfull step by step article, will come in handy, thanks syed.


 
Comment by promosyon
2008-08-08 12:00:42

Thanks for articles, I have searched blog same this since long time


 
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Hey, I am Syed Balkhi, The guy who is behind Balkhis Inc. I entered the industry back in 2002 not knowing a single thing. I barely spoke english at that time. In the past six years, my language barrier has been eliminated. Aside from English, now I also speak html, and php. Along with the languages I have also managed to master a few arts. Art of web-designing started when I first entered. Messing around with photoshop, I learned how to create my first web design. Now I founded a web designing firm Uzzz Productions. After running numerous amount of websites in various niche, I have mastered the art of web-development. Now I am compiling a resource of what I already know, and what I am learning on this blog. This resource is to help me if I ever need a guide to look back to, and it is help my fellow webmasters.

Read more about Syed Balkhi