What is the SEO friendly URL structure on Wordpress

Okay back to some basics today. (Once in a while it’s good to check them right?)

Vaibhav asks what exactly is the search engine friendly URL on Wordpress. Well, very interesting question indeed.
A SEO friendly URL is one which allows the search engine spiders to actually find out what the content is, from the URL itself. So any URL that has sensible phrases and word combinations that help the search engines to find out the content on the page without even going through the content can be termed as search engine friendly. Having said that, the phrases and keywords on the URL should be complimentary to the content on the website and not spammy.

Let’s see how you can make the default URL on wordpress search engine friendly.

If you go to Settings > Permalinks form your Dashboard, you’ll reach the permalinks console that let’s you tweak them. The default option in wordpress is something similar to this – http://www.dailyseoblog.com/?p=123

There are other options as well.
1) Day and name – http://www.dailyseoblog.com/2008/04/22/sample-post/
2) Month and name – http://www.dailyseoblog.com/2008/04/sample-post/
3) Numeric – http://www.dailyseoblog.com/archives/123
4) Custom Structure

The best SEO friendly structure among this is the first one – Day and Time, but the only unnecessary factor is that it’s too long. You only need the Year and Month OR the Month and Date OR the Date alone. We don’t need all of them.

So opt for the “Custom Structure” and give in this format – /%year%/%day%/%postname%/

An alternative way of doing it is including your “Categories” in the URL.
/%year%/%category%/%postname%/

But in this case, I assume that you have SEO friendly categories and are using only one category for each post.

So essentially, make sure that you give all the options on the URL for the search engines to read and make out what the content on your website is all about. So a default option of “www.dailyseoblog.com/?p=123″ gives no information to the search engines, while a custom structure of “www.dailyseoblog.com/2008/how-to-write-seo-friendly-permalinks” does.

Hope it all made sense.