Ved Prakesh
In this post, we will cover why creating SEO-friendly URLs is important and what are the steps to improve SEO in WordPress Site.
Here are tips to improve your organic search Visibility and SEO-friendly URLs:
PERMALINK STRUCTURE
To make web crawlers of popular search engines like Google to find your content and show results, when a user enters a particular keyword or phrase, you have to ensure your URL consist keywords relevant to the content.
For example, if you’re writing about Top social media trends in 2017, your URL should be like this:
www.example.com/top-social-media-trends-in-2017
Rather than this:
Think about it, Which URL would you prefer to click on?
Obviously, the first one. It gives you info about what you will be getting. SEO-friendly URL makes it easy for Google to understand it and users know exactly what content is about.
It’s a Win-win situation for both.
Next, step is changing your permalink structure:
Click on the Settings > Permalinks. You will find various types of permalink options.
- PLAIN: This is the default setting; it doesn’t give any information about the pages/ content.
- DAY AND NAME: This is a better option; at least it helps Google web crawlers to know about the content topic and publishing date, which is also important for readers.
- MONTH AND NAME: It is similar to the one above, but here you can show your content month wise.
- NUMERIC: This numeric is not a good option for SEO, no description of your pages/ content.
- POST NAME: This is the best, and most popular among bloggers. It gives you the option to change your URL to match your piece of content.
- CUSTOM STRUCTURE: If your site has multiple categories, use WordPress-specific tags to change your URL and give Google better information about the content. For example: use a tag like /%category%/%postname%/.
If you want to use categories in your SEO-friendly permalink structure, make sure to use only single category per post. Take some tips from expert Matt Cutts.
Once you’ve made your choice, click on the Save Changes button.
You can even edit, change the URL of Pages/content in the admin dashboard before publishing the post.
CHANGING URLs
A Note for Popular Websites, and businesses. If you switch permalink structure to another one, your social media share counts will reset to zero. You may even damage your existing search rankings.
If your WordPress site is using plain URLs, you should switch to another URL structure. You will lose your social share counts, but the change is far more beneficial for you.
Here’s a good example of SEO-friendly URLs:http://ashutoshjha.org/top-10-best-social-media-management-tools-online-business/
REWRITE YOUR URLs
What to do or not while writing and rewriting URLs in WordPress Website:
Avoid using unnecessary words; it will make your URL lengthy. Keep your URLs short and focused. Remove any words not relevant to the topic and use target keywords. You can omit these (e.g., “a”, “the”, “of”) as they make URLs longer and won’t add up any value. So, a URL like http://yourwebsite.com/top-10-Social-media-tips is better than http://yourwebsite.com/the-top–10-social-media-tips-every-marketer-should-know
SSL CERTIFICATE
To prevent unauthorized access to your website, it is essential to make your site fully encrypted with an SSL certificate.
HTTPS sites rank much better in search engines as they provide better and secured user experience.
Let’s Encrypt: free HTTPS solution, give you more reasons to make a switch and strengthen the website URLs.
USE PLUGINS
There are no such WordPress plugins that can help you with SEO-friendly URLs.
But, the Yoast SEO plugin provides feedback to improve content & URL structure for focused keywords. This way you are able to create SEO-friendly URLs manually.
CONCLUSION
There is no perfect way to create SEO friendly URL. It totally depends upon the kind of website or business you’re doing, your industry, and what your visitors find easy to understand.
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