Creating the Ultimate Wordpress Urls for SEO

In the last few weeks I have seen several tutorials claiming to show how to create an SEO url structure in self-hosted Wordpress powered blogs and websites, only to find that all they did was go into Wordpress settings and select one of the click and go options (fig 1). Luckily I already knew how to create my own truly custom url structure, and now I am going to share that with you.

Step 1: Getting to the Right Admin Area:

Go to your admin panel, which for anyone who doesn't know where this is, is reached by adding wp-admin onto the end of your url. Once there settings is on the bottom of the left hand navigation, and from the menu that extends out below settings on-click, you want to select permalinks.

Step 2: Creating an SEO Permalink Structure

Now as you can see in fig 1 above, you are presented with 4 original (click and go) options:

Default: The default option is for the parameter or query string url structure, i.e. mysite.com/?p=post-id
Day And Name: This gives you the date right down to the day in Year Month Day format (2010/01/25) then /post-name, post-name being the title of the post in question.
Month and Name: This gives you the same as Day and Name, but the date only goes to the month, like 2010/01, then the post-name
Numeric: This gives you /archives and then the post id.

Now, the middle 2 of those are actually okay for SEO. Then finally we have Custom, and an input box, I am going to tell you what to put in that Box to give you the perfect url structure for your site's SEO.

Before version 2 of Wordpress, you had to start with a number or risk losing the ability to access your admin panel. So to get around this my personal choice was to use the date, which is achieved like this: /%day%/%monthnum%/%year%/ that gives you the day in numeric form / the month as a number / the year as a number, which is UK format, for US format simply switch the first two around, and/or start with %year%. Of course if you don't want to use the date you can simply start with /%post_id%/. This is why I have the date in my urls.

As I said you don't need a number anymore, it is totally optional, but my personal choice is still to have the date in the url.

The next (or the first if you so choose) part of the ultimate SEO url for Wordpress is adding the category you have selected for the post. This is because your categories will all or nearly all be keywords or phrases that you will be targeting. This will be true naturally in most cases, but can be done deliberately and scientifically. To add category to your permalink structure, you add /%category%/ to the input box. Note: if you select multiple categories, only 1 can be including in the url, and this will be the lowest numbered category of those chosen.

Then finally, you include the title of the post. Again, this is because your post titles will usually contain keywords and phrases that are part of your niche. To add post title you add: /%postname%/ to the input box.

So, you'll finish up with this: /%day%/%monthnum%/%year%/%category%/%postname%/ Feel free to copy and paste if you like the url structure I use.