After starting a WordPress blog, one of the next most important things to do is to configure your permalink for SEO best practices.
WordPress is a highly user friendly platform, so you can easily access a couple of important features right within your dashboard.
If you are new into blogging, what a permalink is and why it is important to set it up properly might sound a little strange to you.
If you are confused on how to change your permalink, and why it is important to change your permalinks from the default, this guide will help you out.
What is the best permalinks to use for SEO
There are numerous factors that determine your page rank, and a search engine friendly permalink is one of them. Any setting that impacts your search engine rank must not be overlooked. Organic traffic is very important for the growth of any website.
A new WordPress blog comes with a default permalink which is not very much SEO friendly. However, you have the access to easily decide how you want your post URLs to look like. And in this guide, I will show you how to change your WordPress permalink from the default to a custom permalink.
How to change from the default permalinks structure
First of all, log in to your WordPress dashboard,
After, you are logged in to your dashboard, hover your mouse cursor on settings and then click on Permalinks as indicated by the arrow in the picture above. A new window opens that looks exactly like the one below.
Click on post name to change your URL. Post name URL is the best for SEO, because your post names will most likely contain Keywords from your post.
If you feel like just the post name is not going to be enough, you can as well change it to a custom URL just right below the post name.
A custom URL will be most suitable for news companies. Reason is that, they post a lot of articles everyday, so setting just the post name might not be enough in order to avoid future mix up.
Like I said, a custom permalink is the best option for media companies who post a lot of articles every day. So to avoid any future mix up, your permalink should have the format; /%year%/monthnum%/category%/%post name.
Additionally, if you run a media or news website, then you need to setup a permalink structure that contains numbers — if you want your website to get featured in Google news feed.
Once you are done carrying out this setting, the next thing to do is to hit the save button. This new permalinks structure takes effect immediately.
WordPress deals with the redirection of existing posts to your new permalinks. However, my advice to you is to carry out this setting before writing posts on your blog and interlinking them. This way, you will avoid broken links within your blog posts.