3 Tips to Optimize Posts/Pages’ Permalinks for SEO (with examples)
WARNING FOR NEWBIES: Only optimize your future pages/posts this way. Any changes to current permalinks can have an effect on SEO and result in 404 (page not found) errors.
Permalink NOT Optimized
I will show you how to and why you need to optimize your permalinks using the same example as in my previous lessons.
What's wrong with this permalink?
- It's too long and "wordy"
- There is a date (year) in the "slug" which does not make it evergreen. By removing the year in the "slug" (not the title) you can change the year easily in the title without affecting your permalink. Next year I will change the date in the title to 2021 and don't have to worry about the permalink.
New and Improved Permalink
After optimizing my permalink it will look like this:
You may ask but why didn't I just use the post title called "Permalink SEO Best Practices”?
It’s very generic and has no power or emotion words to grab your audience's attention. If you land on Google or see a shared post with these titles, which one will you choose to click?
1. Understanding permalinks and the best practices for SEO in 2020
OR
2. Permalink SEO Best Practices
Permalinks are a little different. You don't want to grab your audience's attention with your permalink. You want them to rather remember it.
Tip 1: Make Your Permalink Shorter and More Memorable
You don't need all the words of your post title in the permalink. You can omit unnecessary words, especially stop words.
Keep your keyword/s.
Keep in mind the removal of stop words can sometimes change the meaning of our text. So we have to be careful when removing unnecessary words. The meaning must stay exactly the same after any change.
Here is a simple example:
The woman meets the man at seven.
Woman meets man seven.
After removing the stop words the meaning changes completely.
Benefits of a Shorter More Memorable Permalink
- Easier to share
- More of the permalink (if not all) is visible on search engines
- Users will remember it easier
- It's good for brand building
Tip 2: Be Concise, to the Point and Have a Keyword Rich Permalink
This falls in with Tip 1. By removing unnecessary words and especially stop words makes your permalink more concise and to the point.
Google does not take stop words into account and making your permalink more to the point helps Google to understand your post/page better with the keyword you got in the “slug”.
Benefits of a Concise, to the Point and Keyword Rich Permalink
- It's more SEO friendly
- It's easier for users to read at a quick glance. Yes, people do sometimes look at permalinks as well when searching for stuff online.
Tip 3: Use Hyphens Between Words
WordPress automatically adds hyphens between each word in the “slug”. If you change your “slug” manually do the same. It’s a must.
If I change my “slug” and do not add hyphens it will look like this:
Search engines will never recognize this as separate words and it’s also not good for any user experience.
Optimizing permalinks is only a small part of your SEO journey, but it still counts towards the bigger picture.
NEXT: How to Manually Change Your Permalink (URL) for a Post or Page
So I just set up my second website for blogging and the content editing tools are not the same in my 2nd site as I have been using in my first site. I just upgraded to Premium a few days ago and I am a loss. I know this thread isn't about that topic but I couldn't find an article published relating to this issue.
Thanks Everyone!
Do I understand it correctly that I can't change the Permalink in WordPress before I publish my post? I always have to publish first and then change it?
I was thinking perhaps the other way I could do it is creating the title and permalink in WordPress and then publish it and put the post on draft or doesn't this make sense?
Is the manual way of changing the permalink in WordPress after publishing your content free of risks to get 404 errors or is there still a chance this can happen?
Looking forwards to hearing from you and thanks a lot for the training.
Jude