WordPress for SEO Tweaks – Permalinks

WordPress for SEO: it’s an open secret!

Tweaking WordPress for SEO Superiority

This is the first in a series of WordPress articles to help you benefit from the considerable potential of WordPress for SEO. You’ll find these articles short, sweet and entirely actionable. They will make a huge difference to how Google views your WordPress website.

The first concerns pagination of your content in WordPress. This is referred to as the permalinks structure. The default is a number with symbols. If you don’t change it you’re probably losing out on a lot of traffic that should be yours!

Why is this? Simply because if you have given your article/post a good heading, it will contain at least one keyword that is relevant to what you’ve written. This will help Google to send along people who actually want to read about your subject. The default setting for Google permalinks gives each post a number which is not particularly helpful. When you change it as outlined below, you will have your title as the page title or identification.

Why not pick an option with a date in it? Well, you can. But typically, expert bloggers decide against it because it gives posts a longer shelf life. Your call.

What To Do

• Go to the Settings tab in your WordPress admin panel
• Click on the Permalinks tab from the dropdown
• For best results select the Post Name option.

That’s it. You’re done! You can read more about this subject over at the WordPress Codex.

If you have a lot of posts that are pulling traffic though, you might want to install 301 redirects instead. To learn more about changing permalinks for WordPress SEO on an established site, Yoast has more.