Best Permalink Settings in Wordpress for Optimized Traffic

What is a Permalink?

Permalink is a portmanteau of permanent link because it’s just that, a link to a specific post or page that will not change and will not suffer link death. Having the best permalink settings can improve how a search engine finds your site. By default, a WordPress permalink looks like this:

http://www.example.com/?p=14

 

This it the “permanent link” to a particular post on your site. It’ll always be there so long as you don’t delete it. Obviously, you want to swap out the 14 for your post ID and example.com with your domain.

A permalink is meant to be permanent because it will always point to a specific item of content, never changing. Whereas the homepage and different archive pages will change as new content is posted, the permanent link will always access the post or page that is defined in it’s body. These are handled in different ways and some CMSes, like MediaWiki, have a timestamp in their permalink so when the wiki’s page is edited, the permalink still links to the version at the time it was created.

However, http://www.example.com/?p=14 isn’t what we’d call “human-readable” because, unless you know your entire database of posts and each one’s associated ID, you can’t interpret what it means other than it points to some post on that domain. So, WordPress has a solution in the form of “pretty” URLs that can easily be interpreted by a regular ol’ human.

How to get to your Permalink Settings in Wordpress

1) Go to your Dashboard (first login obviously by going to http://www.yourdomainname.com/wp-admin.php

2) Then go to Settings and then Permalinks

3) It will look similar to this

The best WordPress permalink settings / structure ?

Wordpress gives you several options of how to setup your permalink settings / structure.

1) Default - http://www.domainname.com/?p=123

This structure (which is the default) as I stated earlier is probably the least desirable one to have so first things first, Change the Default option immediately!!! This is not a memorable site and search engines will not find content based on your URL.

2) Day and Name - http://www.domainname.com/2013/06/19/sample-post/

This structure is slight better than the default but if you don't post regularly having a date attached to the structure is irrelevant.  If people look up your post and find that the date is very old they might consider information out of date and it simply does not help much with SEO results to getting traffic. This is probably a good setting for a person who runs a magazine or news related blog/site where date is important.

3) Month and Name - http://www.domainname.com/2013/06/sample-post/

Same thing goes for this structure as Day and Name. Probably not a good idea to use if you don't post regularly.

4) Numeric - http://www.domainname.com/archives/123

In my opinion this is just as bad as using the default option because it is not "human friendly" and will not improve traffic / SEO results on the URL alone and any little bit helps including the URL of your site to improve SEO results.

4) Post Name - http://www.domainname.com/sample-post

This one I feel is the 2nd best option because you can put in ( in your own words) what the page is about. Like for example this page is called best-permalink-settings-in-wordpress-for-optimized-traffic which contains some keywords for the search engines like best, permalink, settings, wordpress and traffic. 

5) Custom Structure - http://www.domainname.com/%category%/%postname%/

If you want to take it to the next level this is the best option to get the best SEO Results .  Not only are you using in your words what the page is about but you also adding more keywords by indicating what category the post is about. In this page I have made WordPress a sub-category of Blogging so when I categorize this post as a Wordpress post and add the custom structure of /%category%/%postname%/ it makes the structure look like this http://www.trafficmarketingdaddy.com/blogging/wordpress/best-permalink-settings-in-wordpress-for-optimized-traffic

Awesome isn't it?

Rumors about Custom Structure Permalinks Causing Performance Issues

There is a lot of talk about not using the /%category%/%postname%/ permalink structure just because it can cause some performance issues. This was once true in the past but if you are using WordPress version  3.3 and above this is no longer the case.

The problem with the inclusion of category in post URLs was that our database used to query between the category slugs and the main pages (as both as text fields). For example if your post URL was yourblogname.com/privacy/some-post-name/ then the database would initiate a query to find out if the slug privacy is a category name or a page.

In WordPress 3.3 this issue no longer remains a definitive problem as they’ve added some special parameters to differentiate between page slugs and category names.

Otto, one of the core contributors in the WordPress development team confirms it on his blog when he says:

In August 2011, thanks to highly valuable input from Andy Skelton which gave me a critical insight needed to make it work, and with Jon Cave and Mark Jaquith doing testing (read: breaking my patches over and over again), I was able to create a patch which fixed the problem (note: my final patch was slightly over-complicated, Jon Cave later patched it again to simplify some of the handling). This patch is now in WordPress 3.3.

 

Which ever permalink settings you chose be careful to chose the correct option early on because if you decide to ever change it - it will take you some time to change the permalink structure and it could cause  page cannot be displayed errors.