Optimizing website URL is an important step to improve SEO.

Search engine friendly urls can improve your site’s search visibility, especially for long tail keywords with low traffic.

In this article, I will summarize several common SEO optimization methods for urls on WordPress sites.

The root of the domain name

By default, the site root domain takes one of the following forms.

  • example.com
  • example.com
  • www.example.com
  • www.example.com

If we mix these types of urls in a website, search engines will think it’s a mirror version of the site.

Generally, we select one of the “HTTPS” versions and let the other three versions be globally 301 redirected to our “HTTPS” version domain.

From a security perspective, using “HTTPS” means that our site is encrypted using SSL. Many browsers check to see if the user is visiting an “HTTPS” site.

From an SEO perspective, “HTTPS” is a minor ranking signal for search engines.

For these two reasons, enabling HTTPS on a WordPress site can improve SEO rankings and the user experience.

Permalink structure for SEO

If we want the search engine to recognize page content and associate it with a target keyword, we make sure that the URL for that page uses a keyword that matches our target.

For example, for this article, I would use the following URL:

www.example.com/seo-friendl…

Instead of:

www.example.com/?p=123

Obviously, the first URL tells the search engine what the page is about, while it’s hard to know what the topic of the second URL is.

To modify the Permalink structure in WordPress, go to Setting>Permalink and select the following options:

  • Plain: No good, because the URL does not describe the topic or content of the page.
  • Day and Name: This is a good URL structure because it helps search engines know what the content of the page is and the exact date it was published, but including a date in the URL is bad for the overall URL structure and classification of the site. In addition, search engines do not determine when a web page was published by simply recognizing the date in the URL.
  • Month and name: same as above.
  • Numeric: Like the first structure, the URL does not have a keyword that describes the content of the page, so it is not good.
  • Post Name: This is a popular URL structure because it includes the keywords of the page.
  • Custom Structure: This is the most common URL Structure. A typical web site is made up of several parts, and “/%category%/%postname%/” can be used to add a page category to the URL. We can use it to give search engines more information about the structure of the site.

Site structure vs. URL structure

Now that we know the basic URL structure, we need to organize our urls properly according to our site map and main navigation.

Such as:

  • example.com/services/sub-services/service-name
  • example.com/about/our-history
  • example.com/contact

The URL content

The URL of our website needs to include our target keywords and remove any irrelevant text.

Note: Prepositions and articles in English urls do not increase or decrease page SEO rankings.

In addition, the length of a URL does not affect SEO rankings. But I personally prefer to keep urls as short as possible because a long URL often contains irrelevant text.

Finally, we need to make sure that the FORMAT of the URL is as consistent as possible. We can replace Spaces with – or _. But please don’t mix them within one site.


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