WP SEO Tips: Structured Permalinks

Comments

1. Wayde Christie (3 comments.) says:

   2/19/2007 at 7:56 am

   Great article.

   I’m keen to know what plugin this site uses to concatenate long links?

   Cheers!
2. Santosh GS (2 comments.) says:

   2/19/2007 at 9:04 am

   ^ Plugin ?! It can be found in the wp-admin/options-permalink.php of your blog!
3. Ashish Mohta (19 comments.) says:

   2/19/2007 at 9:48 am

   Thats really a great set of tips!!
4. Aja Lapus (4 comments.) says:

   2/19/2007 at 10:02 am

   @Santosh GS: Maybe he’s talking about the link with “weblogtoolsc…gle-subscribers” that I’d like to know how to automatically do too—if I am right that he means to concatenate the beginning and the end of long links to form shorter ones.
5. Santosh GS (2 comments.) says:

   2/19/2007 at 10:28 am

   Oopps.. you mean something like this plugin ?
6. Jonathan (83 comments.) says:

   2/19/2007 at 12:58 pm

   Santosh: I had to shorten it because it was too long for the line in the actual post. If I could, I would have spread the whole thing out in the article.
7. Keith (6 comments.) says:

   2/19/2007 at 2:36 pm

   Another suggestion. This isn’t really much of SEO. Besides having permanlinks, you can also include a .html at the end of the permalinks, so that each post looks like a static page.
8. jazzle (2 comments.) says:

   2/19/2007 at 2:59 pm

   @Jonathan: …com/year/month/day/… isn’t difficult for humans – in fact it’s really useful. Using Firefox (and a plugin) I can middle click the reload button* to go up a level and see the archive for that day, month, or year. *- or any of various other browsers with this functionality.

   @Keith: Search Engines aren’t that stupid. Think about it, there are many URLs which don’t end with .html (or any other extension) – directory indexes…
9. Jeff Kee (1 comments.) says:

   2/19/2007 at 3:18 pm

   I wrote a blog post on WOrdpress and SEO a few days ago as well and I pitched this point – always use the permalink structure to include the date/title… also note you can customize the post slug (the URL title) too, so that even if your title is a catch/obscure one that hides the keywords, you can still include the keywords in the URL anyhow!!!!

   i.e. “Greatest Blogging Secret!!!” could be the title but you are talking about a plugin that helps promote blog traffic. the slug should be “wordpress-blog-plugin-to-increase-traffic”.
10. Jonathan (83 comments.) says:

    2/19/2007 at 3:20 pm

    Jazzle: I never said that structure was difficult for humans to read, but shorter will always be better for humans.
11. Jeff Mills (1 comments.) says:

    2/19/2007 at 5:37 pm

    It took me a while to come to a correct permalink structure and I was first devestated I was using the /P=12 style when I first built my blog.

    Once I learned the permalink customization, combines with plugins for making my post titles more SEO friendly, then it was a home run and now google spiders my posts daily.
12. Lucas McDonnell (3 comments.) says:

    2/19/2007 at 7:40 pm

    If you do need to change your permalink structure after going with one that didn’t work for you (I changed mine from date-based archives to just the post name), I would highly suggest this permalink updating plugin: http://www.deanlee.cn/wordpres.....on-plugin/.

    You just enter your old permalink structure, and it automatically redirects to the correct new permalink. No messing around with redirects.
13. azrin (11 comments.) says:

    2/19/2007 at 9:30 pm

    Using Permalinks won’t help much too.
    Look at the head tag , a Description , Keyword and Abstract is just as important to rate yr site. An ACRA will get it further.

    I use like http://www.azrin.net/yikes which looks like a static page *(%postname%) as that carry a higher ranking. Also a MetaTag for the individual post also carry more marks as the engine will see what your relevancy tags in relation to the url and content.

    That’s my 2c worth, and if you are porting over, don’t be lazy and just port by SQL, switch yr Technorati and ping tools on , and manually insert each and every one of them. After that, you can back date them. Seems that the spiders love you for posting 300+++ posts at a short. Time consuming….but it works!*(or use a RPC TOOL)
14. Joneh (1 comments.) says:

    2/19/2007 at 10:59 pm

    Hmm, interesting to know all these. Mine just the normal year,month,day link to my post. totally newbie ere.
15. Jason (75 comments.) says:

    2/20/2007 at 12:46 am

    Great article.
    I agree with Lucas about using the permalink redirect plugin for anyone that’s used the default link structure (or any different structure) for any amount of time. Potential readers really don’t like 404’s.
16. Jonathan (83 comments.) says:

    2/20/2007 at 12:58 am

    Azrin: Thanks for the tip, that SEO tip will be part of a future article I write. I will incorporate much more than just those couple things though. Don’t jump the gun on me!
17. Wayde Christie (3 comments.) says:

    2/20/2007 at 2:14 am

    @Aja Lapus – you were right

    @Santosh GS – Thanks for the heads up!
18. Andy Beard (25 comments.) says:

    2/20/2007 at 6:19 am

    Denis at Semiologic normally suggests including date or post number in any permalink otherwise it can cause performance issue
19. Néstor (1 comments.) says:

    2/20/2007 at 9:42 pm

    thanks for the tips!
20. Jonathan (83 comments.) says:

    2/21/2007 at 7:58 pm

    Andy: Performance issues with WordPress? I haven’t heard of that ever being an issue, but I’ll run it by the developers to see if that’s true or not.
21. Andy Beard (25 comments.) says:

    2/21/2007 at 8:19 pm

    I have seen him mention it a number of times on his forum and elsewhere

    Here is just one thread example I found doing a search

    http://forum.semiologic.com/di.....s-for-seo/
22. J-Bo (1 comments.) says:

    2/21/2007 at 10:55 pm

    Great article, raises a very usefull point!
    Dugg.
23. sohbet (1 comments.) says:

    2/22/2007 at 12:28 am

    I agree about using the permalink redirect plugin for anyone that’s used the default link structure (or any different structure) for any amount of time. Potential readers really don’t like 404’s
24. Adeq says:

    3/27/2007 at 2:24 am

    Kewl
25. Adriena says:

    3/28/2007 at 1:55 pm

    Nice..nice post.

Trackbacks/Pingbacks

1. Adworkz - Website Development and Marketing » Wordpress SEO Tips Part 2 says:

   2/19/2007 at 10:38 pm

   […] One of the most important things that needs to be done is to change the permalink structure of the blog to some much more natural than what comes pre-configured in WordPress. It is very easy to change and only takes a second. By changing the permalink structure to include the actual postname in the URL, it will be indexed much cleaner in the search engines, and will be indexed with the post title as the page title. Jonathan at Weblog Tools Collection has a great writeup this exact topic. […]
2. 我爱水煮鱼 » WP SEO 技巧：结构化永久链接 says:

   5/2/2007 at 2:02 pm

   […] Weblog Tools Collection çš„ WP SEO Tips: Structured Permalinks。 […]
3. 我爱水煮鱼 » WP SEO 技巧：如何设计主题 says:

   5/19/2007 at 12:21 pm

   […] Weblog Tools Collection çš„ WP SEO Tips: Design like a robot。 […]
4. Wordpress SEO Tips Part 2 | Adworkz says:

   6/4/2008 at 3:37 pm

   […] One of the most important things that needs to be done is to change the permalink structure of the blog to some much more natural than what comes pre-configured in WordPress. It is very easy to change and only takes a second. By changing the permalink structure to include the actual postname in the URL, it will be indexed much cleaner in the search engines, and will be indexed with the post title as the page title. Jonathan at Weblog Tools Collection has a great writeup this exact topic. […]