In this video we’re going to talk about optimizing WordPress and how to change your WordPress permalink structure which is hugely important for SEO, absolutely essential, and it’s really easy to do through WordPress, so go ahead and go to your website.
Go to wp-admin, log into the back end of your site, and under here under settings, the settings tab you can hover, scroll over, and click on permalinks. Right now any permalinks that you have on your website are going to look like this default. So the page would be: questions mark, p=123 or some baloney like that. The problem with that is that it doesn’t have any keywords in it, and Google just sees some random garble which is not good for SEO.
Keyword Focused URLs
You want keywords in the URL string, especially if you have a site for which you’re trying to rank a number of different pages rather than just the home page which has become really an effective way of ranking sites, and it gives you a lot broader spread to make your website rank. So, it’s real easy to change the structure though.
If you have a website that is going to be content heavy, and it’s going to have a lot of posts, and there is a potential that some of the posts might even have the same name, what you can do is you can put month and year and name, so let’s put the year and the month and the name, or you can just have the year if you wanted to take the other parts out
For almost every site that we do we want to have those keywords because we’re going to use keywords to name our pages as close to the URL as possible. So we’ll change the structure to a postname structure, and I’ll show you here and just automatically switch it. You can enter this code manually if you want, but WordPress is set up now to where that’s all you’ve got to do. So go ahead and “save changes,” and then if you have a page that you’ve created there’s already a sample page.
This is just a blank website with no website design yet, and you view that page, then there is your permalink structure right there. That’s a very pretty URL. So going back here if you were to create a new page, and you just type in “new page.”
Then automatically WordPress is going to give you a URL string, and it has a nice URL structure for the permalink, and if you want, you can change this. If you want to have the page title be something different, than what’s in the permalink, sure, go for it, change it. Then you just publish that page, and you can see again you’ve got your URL, the basic URL, the root, and then this nice, keyword-friendly URL string, and that’s all there is to it.