How to create SEO-friendly URL structures in Wordpress
Wordpress comes with built-in support for SEO-friendly URL structures. It means that you can easily choose a custom URL structure for your Wordpress website.
But let's start with the basics ...
When you create a new post/page, Wordpress will automatically create a slug (URL, permalink) for you:
As you can see, the URL has been created based on the title itself. However, that's not the default Wordpress option for permalinks. The default "Plain" option will generate permalinks like this:
Why? It's simple ... By default, WordPress uses post IDs (numbers) instead of pretty keyword text in the URLs. Which is anything but SEO-friendly ... Isn't descriptive, there are no keywords in it, etc. Luckily, you can easily change that ... Just go to Settings => Permalinks, select "Custom Structure" and add the post name variable as default tag:
And that's it ... Wordpress will use your title to generate descriptive, keyword-rich URLs ...
However, using a custom URL structure is just the first step in creating SEO-friendly URLs.
Why? Because having duplicate post titles can kill all your efforts ... It may sound incredible, but is a very common error! And the problem is pretty obvious: for an identical title, Wordpress will create an identical URL, by adding a number at the end of URL slug. Something like this:
Obviously, that's very bad for SEO. Since duplicate post titles are using the same keywords, this will confuse search engines when deciding which post should be ranked for the keywords used in your post/page. Of course, you can easily edit the slug URL ...
... but other, additional problems may occur, for example, you can't get rid of those numbers when you have the same slug being used already ...
And let's face it, we are talking about issues that can be easily overlooked ... Especially when you have a lot of articles/pages, if you simply forgot to delete previous versions of the same post/page (as long as the post or page stays in the trash, the slug cannot be re-used.), etc.
More than that, all these issues - that can be relatively easily avoided or solved on single-author websites - could become a real SEO nightmare on multi-author websites where guest bloggers and other users with author role can create their own titles, slugs, etc!
This is why you need a reliable solution to avoid duplicate titles and to create unique, SEO-friendly URLs. And this is I've decided to create a short tutorial where I will show you how to easily prevent duplicate titles and incorrect permalink URLs.
Interested?
Here it is:
How to create SEO-friendly URL structures in Wordpress
Enjoy it!
Recent Comments
19
Hi Zed! ...... Followed your instructions, got to the custom structure and like you said, they are all the same accept for the numbers behind the URL. So how do i know which post they refer to in order to add the descriptive title?
Cheers
Bobby
You van enter the URL in a browser to see the final destination ... But it's easier to open each post in the editor and edit the slug according to its title.
See more comments
Thanks for this useful informations as always!
Ingrid
And I thank YOU! As always :)