WordPress Optimization Tips: Choosing the Right URL Structure

Recently, we compared WordPress with two other CMSs, concluding that it is perhaps the most user-friendly blogging platform that automatically takes care of pretty much everything for you. However, one of the rare things you need to fix as soon as you start using WordPress is its poor URL settings or permalinks.

Defaulty Ugliness

Default WordPress URL structure is not the most SEO-friendly structure out there, and that is putting it mildly. In fact, it is downright ugly and unattractive (no wonder search engines don’t see it, and even when they do, they tend to look away). So, in this article we will try to show you how to make SEO-friendly URL structure for your WordPress page.

Since default WordPress URL structures like http://webpagenamer.com/?p=25 or %postname% are quite robotic and not user or SEO friendly, our goal is to make the URL structure more predictable and friendly, so your user is able to figure out the title and theme just by looking at the URL, even before reading the article itself. Of course, we want the same goal to be accomplished for Search Engines as well.

Planning Your Structure

Your ideal URL should be: intuitive, semantic, descriptive, robot/user-friendly and brief. Make sure you plan your structure as if you are 15 again and you’re choosing your email address (we all know how many faux-pas happened with those, right?). Once you’ve picked one, you’re pretty much stuck with it. As for using the categories, if you plan on putting one blog post in more than one category, you probably shouldn’t use category name in you URL structure (but more on that a bit later).

Including the Date

Dates in your URL can be tricky. The major problem is that you can’t re-use the URL without changing it. For example, say you stumble upon a URL that is over a year old, but also find one that was published only a few days ago, which one would you click on? Here are some of the advantages and disadvantages of including the date in you URL:

Advantages

– Your users would find blog posts much easier as they will see them sorted by year, month and day.

– It is excellent for breaking news, as Google will see that the content is really fresh.

Disadvantages:

– Your article could have a really cool and (still) relevant content, but the date might render your awesome text obsolete.

– If you were to update your old blog post, you would need to make a new URL and ultimately lose some of the link value. The alternative is keeping the old URL, but when a post is getting old, the date in the URL is a negative signal, not only for users, but for Google freshness algorithm.

Category + Postname

When using this option your tag should look something like this /%category%/%postname%/ – and the preview will be: http://website.com/category/postname/. But, let’s take a closer look to pros and cons of using categories in your post name.

Pros:

– Users and search engines will easily see where this blog post belongs.

– Google will recognize that all the posts in a certain category are about the same topic and build authority accordingly.

– Works well with natural navigation.

– Excellent for Web Analytics.

Cons:

– Doesn’t work well for long category names.

– Not optimal if you have many categories, or you tend to put blog posts in more than one category.

– You can’t have a page and category with the same name.

– If your blog is in a subfolder, your URLs can get too long.

All in all, the pattern is probably clear by now – there are no right or wrong URLs, only more or less optimal ones. Just keep them brief, descriptive, user and robot-friendly, and your blog post and search engines will be on the same page (sort to speak).