Which Is the Best WordPress Permalink Structure For SEO?

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In this article we are going to discuss the importance of setting Permalink correctly both to help with search engine as well as help click through rate. Learn which is the best WordPress permalink structure which helps for SEO and how to change and redirect WordPress permalink.

What Is a Permalink

A Permalink is the web address of your post page of your site. Which is domain name followed by some words or numbers. It’s a URL which people will use to find the content over your website.

By default, WordPress has a Permalink which passes “p=? “. Which shows that to browse certain pages we need to pass post ID as a parameter. It is hard to guess the content of a page using just post ID. This type of Permalink is called ugly Permalink which won’t help to content to grow over search engine. This type of Permalink wouldn’t help search engine as well as readers because we don’t know what the post is about.

Best SEO Friendly WordPress Permalink Structure

An alternative Permalink structure for WordPress is domain name, followed by post name. This type of Permalink is called search engine friendly Permalink OR user-friendly Permalink.

How To Change Permalink in WordPress

First thing you need to do is go to WordPress Dashboard - > Settings ->Permalink. You can see that by default WordPress set default Permalink with the post ID.

We have quite a few other options of Permalink’s to choose from. But SEO experts recommence Permalink structure is one with the post name.

The second and third Permalink like the day followed by post name and month followed by post name is also good Permalink but it is a good for news site or blog which publishes articles on daily basis. We should not choose date wise Permalink because sometimes it reflects older content and people avoid old content.

That’s the reason SEO experts across the globe recommended post name as SEO friendly Permalink in WordPress. You can choose from radio button and select save changes to affect new Permalink.

Whenever you have a new blog, we highly recommend that you change your WordPress Permalink as soon as possible.

So, what we do if we have existing website or blog, and we want to change Permalink from default to post name.

In that case we still go with the process of changing Permalink from default to post name like we mention in previous paragraph and other things you want to do is to setup 301 redirect from the old original post to new URL.

How To Redirect Old URL To New Permalink URL In WordPress

There are many ways you can permanent redirect your old Permalink to new Permalink. You can use following to plug-ins to achieve the same result.

Redirection plugin:

We recommend this plug-in for 301 redirect and highly advise in case changing your Permalink. You just need to install this plug-in. This plug-in is particular useful are migrating pages from an old website or changing the default Permalink structure or directly.

So that’s it. Now you have a search engine friendly Permalink structure for your blog. Let me know by comments if you face any difficulty by changing Permalink in WordPress. All answers a reply within 24 hours.