If you want to set yourself up for success with the search engines, it’s important to choose the best WordPress permalink structure for SEO. If you don’t change the permalinks in your WordPress settings menu, you could really end up screwing yourself out of a lot of traffic, and therefore a lot of exposure, money, and ultimately people that may really end up liking your website. There are a lot of total noobs out there (a.k.a. n00bs gone wild) that don’ t change their permalinks from the default structure and end up with considerably less traffic than they could have coming to their website. In this article, I (Andrew Pavelski) am going to do my best to break down the best permalink structures for optimization as well as the worst (or structures that you probably shouldn’t ever use in the first place).
What the heck are “Permalinks?”
The Start of a Permalink (URL)
Permalinks are basically just the way that your website’s URL’s appear in the search engines and people visiting your website. To keep things as simple, just think of them as permanent links to your website’s articles. Although the term sounds fairly weird if you aren’t an experienced blogger or heavily involved in website development, most people blogging know what they are (even if they aren’t using the best structure for SEO). Most people don’t really think about them when visiting other websites unless you are somewhat of a total nerd (like myself).
Examples of Common Permalink Structures in WordPress
Post ID Number Permalink Structure (Default):
- http://andrewpavelski.com/?p=N
This type of permalink structure is the worst for SEO and just looks like someone puked up a question mark and some numbers at the end of your URL. I don’t like it at all and you shouldn’t either if you want more search engine traffic. This is the default structure and you should change it before you make even one post on your website or blog.
Day and Name Permalink Structure:
- http://andrewpavelski.com/2011/07/29/sample-post/
This permalink structure absolutely pwn’s the one that I initially listed above. It includes the name of the post (“Sample Post”) as well as the year, month, and day. If you want to get search engine traffic, this type of permalink structure will work very well. In fact, if your eyes are open and you are looking at the URL structure on this website, you will see that it’s the structure that I’m using. Near the end of the article, I will discuss why this is the permalink structure that I rock on my personal website.
Month and Name Permalink Structure:
- http://andrewpavelski.com/2011/07/sample-post/
This permalink structure is similar to “Day and Name” in the fact that it provides the name of the post as well as the year and month that the article was posted. It really isn’t much different or any better in terms of SEO in comparison to the Day and Name structure. All that it does is move the name of your post in the URL a little bit shorter in the search engine results. Instead of the extra number that you get with the Day and Name, you only get the Month and Year. So if you wanted to look back and see what year and month a certain post was published, this will work great. However, if you want to know the exact day that you published it on, you may be pulling out grey hairs trying to figure it out because it won’t give away the day. It’s less comprehensive in terms of the date.
Numeric Permalink Structure:
- http://andrewpavelski.com/archives/123
This permalink structure is a step down in comparison to the “Day and Name” as well as the “Month and Name” structures for the simple fact that the “name” is missing in the URL. Instead of including the post title of a post, a number is included. For the structure listed above, this would be the structure that we would see for the 123rd post on AndrewPavelski.com. Let me just say that I hope nobody ever actually makes 123 posts using this structure… There is an integral component of SEO missing in this structure; the post name in the URL. If you are starting a website, please don’t ether yourself or your chances of getting search engine traffic – stay away from using this structure.
Custom Permalink Structures:
- http://andrewpavelski.com/sample-post/
- http://andrewpavelski.com/category/sample-post/
- http://andrewpavelski.com/sample-post.html/
- http://andrewpavelski.com/category/sample-post.html/
People go absolutely crazy with custom permalink structures these days. On other websites that I own, I have experimented with variations of custom permalink structures. I would say the most common custom structure would be the one I have listed up top. There are many reasons for which the custom /%postname%/ has become so popular these days. There are also many reasons why adding .HTML or .HTM to the end of your permalinks is thought to have benefit. The custom structures that I have above will work well for SEO.
In fact, the majority of people that think they’ve got some special ancient Chinese wisdom would probably tell me that I should have went with http://andrewpavelski.com/sample-post.html/ for my website permalinks structure. I have reasons for being different though with my permalink structure (I will explain later in the post). For now let’s get to discuss which permalink structure is best for SEO.
What is the best permalink structure for SEO? Any with /%postname%/ in their structure?
The truth is that the best permalink structure for SEO has one element in common – the name of the post included in the URL. So somewhere in your permalink structure, you will want to make sure that you see /%postname%/ somewhere. If you don’t see the name of your post (article title) in your permalinks (URLs), you are sabotaging yourself from doing well and being the best you can be as far as search engine results and SEO are concerned.
Let’s say you wrote an article called “The Art of Slangin Yayo” and posted it up. You would want to make sure that somewhere in your URL (permalink) you saw the keywords from the title in this type of format: /the-art-of-slangin-yayo/. If you did not see those keywords anywhere in your URL after you made a post, you are definitely doing something wrong and need some help real quickfast to get things straightened out and fixed.
If you want to get really technical, there are plenty of debates and disputes surrounding which permalinks are the Gods of all other permalinks. In other words, which ones are the most superior structure to get your website ranked the highest in the Google search engine? Everyone wants the latest tips and tricks so that they can rank number one, right? It seems as though if I had to pick one to be the most superior structure, it would likely be the /%postname%.html/ structure because having just the /%postname%/ keeps it short and sweet for visitors to see in the search results.
Does adding .HTML or .HTM to permalinks give a slight SEO boost in the rankings?
Some would argue that yes it definitely does, while others would argue that it doesn’t do much. The rationale behind adding .HTML or .HTM to the end of your permalinks is so that Google is able to recognize the fact that your post is a static page. Personally, I’m on the fence whether adding the .HTML and .HTM extensions are really beneficial. I have seen websites that aren’t using .HTML outrank ones that are and vice versa. If it does happen to play a role in rankings, it’s better to have the extra SEO boost on your side by adding .HTML extension. If you added it and it doesn’t have any effect, it’s not going to fair any worse than websites without these extensions.
With all of that said, the primary SEO benefit comes from including the “Name” (/%postname%/) somewhere in your permalinks structure. It doesn’t matter if you have numbers, .HTML’s, or are just an extra special person, in order to give your website the biggest SEO boost from permalinks, you need to include /%postname%/ – and that’s all I’m going to say. You really don’t need to know or worry about anything else other than having the “name” included in your URLs. If you do that, you’ll be fine and will be on the right track.
What is the worst permalink structure for SEO? Any lacking %postname% are generally bad news…
Since we now know that the best permalink structure always involves /%postname%/ (a.k.a. the post title) in the URL, what would be the worst possible permalinks structure for SEO? I’m not sure what the absolute worst case scenario would be, but I can tell you that a couple of the “common structures” that WordPress includes are nothing but bad news. So what are these structures that in my opinion shouldn’t even be an option on the menu?
Post ID Number Permalink Structure (Default):
- http://andrewpavelski.com/?p=N
Numeric Permalink Structure:
- http://andrewpavelski.com/archives/123
Out of common courtesy, if you see someone or know someone using a permalink structure that does NOT include /%postname%/ – it would probably be very helpful to that person to let them know that they are essentially screwing themselves (well maybe use some different words than what I suggested). You could just email them and say something like “check out this awesome article Andrew Pavelski wrote about permalink structure, I think it would be highly beneficial to the growth of your website if you read it.” Feel free to share this article with anyone that’s in need of a little bit of help because we all had to learn at some point and have made mistakes coming up.
Are you going to rot and perish at the hand of the search engines if you don’t have the optimal structure? No. If you seriously just want to be different and don’t care much about getting actual traffic, I honestly don’t even know why you’d be reading this article – just roll with whatever. Heck maybe you could even make up your own permalink structure by adding a .n00b or .idontwanttraffic or even .GTFOH if you really want to let people know where you stand on the issue…
Personally, I don’t think that WordPress should even have the Post ID Number permalinks as the default structure. Maybe it’s complicated to change the WordPress default, but if it were up to me, I would put text like “not recommended for SEO” next to both of these structures so that people know what’s up. In fact, if you read my story below, you’ll understand why I wish these two common structures weren’t even included in the permalinks menu.
My personal story involving critical mistakes with permalinks
When I first started blogging back in December 2007 on my very first blog, I chose a good permalink structure with the “Day and Name” permalink structure. So all of my posts on my first website were in this format: http://andrewpavelski.com/2011/07/29/sample-post/. This is the exact same format that I’m now using here (as I already mentioned). My first website is still up and is doing well. Unlike most people’s first websites that they start, mine actually turned out to be a great money maker and still has tons of potential for growth. Part of the reason that it has done so well is due to the fact that I selected a solid permalink structure for SEO.
Although my first website turned out to be a pretty nice success, my second website didn’t do so well. My second website was ironically HERE at http://andrewpavelski.com – and I started it in 2008 to try to document my make money online ventures and journey. Well, shit really hit the fan for a number of reasons. The main reason that my website didn’t get nearly the traffic that it should have is due to the permalink structure that I went with. To be different from my first website, I ended up making the typical “noob gone wild” type mistake of choosing one of the worst permalink structures because I thought it looked “cleaner.”
Although I didn’t go with the super ugly “Post ID Number” permalink structure a.k.a. the Default, I did choose one that’s really bad. I ended up choosing the “Numeric” permalink structure so all of my posts looked like this: http://andrewpavelski.com/archives/123/. The thing is that since I was such a total newbie at the time, I just thought that if I worked harder, the wrong permalink structure wouldn’t really matter. Well, it turned out that it definitely did matter as far as SEO is concerned. I didn’t get nearly the total traffic that I should have and was getting frustrated that my website wasn’t getting the exposure that I wanted it to get.
I was building plenty of links and knew how to increase website traffic with some link building methods, but I didn’t have a clue that permalink structure helped much with SEO. When I had a couple of other bloggers that I met take a look at my website to see if it was fully optimized for SEO, the first thing that they pointed out was that I had made some key SEO mistakes. My major mistake was that I had chosen an absolutely terrible (ugly, pukey, etc.) permalink structure that Google hated. So basically the website http://andrewpavelski.com had content, but it wasn’t getting hardly any search traffic – it was all coming from my link building and social media sources; not good.
I think I ended up building up an average of about 50 to 60 loyal visitors (subscribers), but it was tough for new peeps to find my website through the search engine. When I found out that I couldn’t just do a quick fix on my permalink structure by going to the settings menu and just selecting a different structure, I wanted to pull my hair out and smash my computer. Fortunately I did neither and just ended up letting the website rot while focusing my efforts on other projects. I got burned out from working on something that wasn’t getting traffic.
To make a long story short, I got so sick of all the mistakes that I had initially made with my website, I just let it expire and pretty much said “F that website” in regards to my personal site. For the first year, I renewed it in 2009 and just let it sit. I used the sidebar to link out to my other websites that I was building, but never worked on it. Then I figured it wasn’t even worth the effort to fix up because there were so many coding errors in my theme, the permalink structure was totally messed up, and I didn’t have any urge to pay the $10 renewal fee at the end of the second year that I stopped working on it.
In the late summer (August 2010), I decided I wanted to start up my website http://andrewpavelski.com again and write about some workouts that I was doing. I wanted to post up my P90X experiences as well as my Insanity workouts. When I went to try to buy my domain back, I ended up falling victim to cybersquatting from AcquireThisDomain who wouldn’t sell me back my personal website for any less than $3000 USD. I kind of laughed at the fact that even though I wanted it, they likely didn’t have anyone named Andrew Pavelski on staff that wanted it for themselves – they just wanted to hustle me out of some serious cash. Safe to say I got it back for $10 a year later after they let it expire. Anyways, that was a whole separate learning experience…
I just wanted to make it clear that doing something as simple as choosing the wrong permalink structure when starting a blog can really set yourself up for failure. It’s not the end of the world if you have the wrong permalinks, but it will really hurt your chances of showing up higher in the rankings for certain keywords. So whenever you’re starting a website, make sure that you’ve got the right permalink structure selected with /%postname%/ – learn from my experience that I just shared.
Why choosing the best permalink structure for SEO is important…
You’ll get more traffic – As I already mentioned, you’ll end up with considerably more search engine traffic if you choose a permalink structure with /%postname%/ included somewhere in your URL. If you are missing this key element, you’re going to have a really tough time claiming that you know what you’re doing online. If you make the same mistake as I originally did, everything is going to seem like an uphill battle that you cannot possibly win. Plus who the heck doesn’t want more traffic?
It looks better – A less important aspect of including the /%postname%/ is the simple fact that they look better to visitors. People will be wondering what the heck they are seeing in your URL if you don’t have an optimized permalink structure. These are called “pretty permalinks” for a reason – they are prettier than the others. Whenever someone links to your website in an email message, posts up your article in a forum, or sends a link from their personal website, your URL’s will look better and actually reflect the title of your post.
People will link to you more often – I personally think that people will be way more likely to link to your content if your permalinks have a good structure. If your posts have either the Default structure or the Numeric structure, people will know that you’re probably not too sharp when it comes to setting up your website. Why would they want to link to your content if they think you don’t know what you’re even doing with your permalinks? Even if you do get links, you’re going to get considerably fewer than any where people can see your post title in the URLs. One thing that I experienced with the Numeric permalink structure is that people would select the permalink from the wrong article to link to from their personal websites (because the URLs are so vague).
How to change your permalink structure from the default?
To change your permalinks when starting a new website, it’s actually really easy and only takes a few scrolls and clicks of the mouse.
1. Log in to your WordPress website
2. On the left side menu bar in your WP Admin, scroll down to “Settings”
3. Under the “Settings” menu, click on “Permalinks”
4. Change your permalinks from the Default to a new structure
5. What I recommend…
I recommend either “Day and Name,” “Month and Name,” or “Custom.” If you decide to go with “Custom Permalinks,” I’d personally go with /%postname%.html/ – because that’s the structure that I think has the greatest SEO benefit without looking like complete trash or over-optimizing.
Keep in mind that there are a number of custom variables that you can use when creating “Custom Permalinks.” These include the following:
- %year% – the year 2011
- %monthnum% – the month number (April would be 04)
- %day% – today’s calendar date (e.g. the 1st of the month would be 01)
- %hour% – hour of the day (10:00 A.M. would be 10)
- %minute% – minute of the hour (e.g. 30th minute would be 30)
- %second% – second of the minute (e.g. 10th second would be 10)
- %post_id% – unique identification of the post (e.g. 283)
- %postname% – the name of the post (I already explained this)
- %category% – the name of the category
- %tag% – the name of the tag slug field (not recommended)
- %author% – the name of the author (not recommended)
By listing all of the options that you can customize, my goal was not to confuse you, but to just show you that there are tons of ways to structure your permalinks. I personally don’t think that including “hour,” “minute,” “second,” “tag,” or “author,” in the structure is a good idea. I would just stay away from creating your own formula for permalinks and use a structure that is already known to work well for SEO. I don’t want you to be kicking yourself down the road for playing around and adjusting things in the custom structure that screws up your search engine traffic.
How to change your permalink structure if you chose the wrong structure when you started your blog
Start from scratch…
If you have already posted up content using the wrong permalink structure, hopefully you didn’t post a lot of it. If you have been using the wrong structure for years, then you’re in major trouble. However, what I would do if I made posts with the wrong structure is to probably clean everything out by saving them to my desktop and deleting them from the database. I would clear out the whole database and then change my permalink structure to one with /%postname%/ in it somewhere. After making the appropriate changes, I would just start fresh with the new permalink structure and enjoy getting the traffic that I was initially missing out on.
Hire a professional…
For people that are in a situation where they chose the wrong permalink structure from the start and have been blogging for a few years, I’d probably just leave it “as-is” and accept the fact that you made a mistake. There are ways to switch permalinks, but they are really complicated and beyond my personal capabilities as a blogger. I would probably get a professional consultation with someone that knows how to change them and pay them money to see whether they could help me fix things up so that my permalink structure isn’t complete trash for the rest of my life.
K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple Stupid): Don’t overcomplicate your permalink structure
I’ve noticed that a lot of people online really like to overcomplicate permalink structure, especially when it comes to the “custom structure.” Really as long as you have /%postname%/ somewhere in your permalinks, the differences in ranking potential are fairly minimal. I wouldn’t really worry about permalinks if you have already chosen a structure that I recommended above. To be honest, I’ve tested out plenty of different permalinks on various websites that I run and I actually don’t see where people can claim that one is so much better than the other if both include /%postname%/. I don’t want people to overcomplicate things or over-think here because it’s just not necessary – use the K.I.S.S. principle and keep it simple stupid.
Why content is always more important than permalink structure
The one thing that most people fail to realize is that content is way more important than permalink structure. At the end of the day, you could still be using the Default structure or even the Numeric structure and if people are still able to find your website and enjoy the content, it is going to get links back. If your content is kick ass to the point where thousands of people start linking to it, you are going to do well regardless of whether you chose a permalink structure that’s straight outta the landfill.
When it comes down to someone using the generic custom “/%postname%/” versus someone who is using /%year%/%month%/%day%/%postname%/ – the website that’s going to rank higher is the one that will deserve to rank higher based on the quality of content or likeability. If one website is clearly more likeable and has better content than the other, it will have no problem out ranking its competition. Just think about it yourself for a second: would you rather have a post written by Steve Pavlina on your website using a garbage permalink structure or a random .blogspot post about how my Cheerios tasted this morning… it’s a no brainer.
However, why not just kick major ass with the best permalink structure for SEO in addition to good content? If you set yourself up with the right permalinks and do a good job with your articles, you are going to have the most success. Although good content will get links from Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, and more it’s still important to keep your website optimized so that you don’t miss out on search engine traffic from Google.
Conclusion
Why I run the “Day and Name” permalink structure on AndrewPavelski.com
The major reason that I use the “Day and Name” (/%year%/%month%/%day%/%postname%/) permalink structure here on my own website is because I like seeing the full date of my posts. Obviously it does kind of look fairly long and drawn out, but I like seeing what I wrote in the past and when I wrote it. Plus, having the date allows me to see how my writing and learning has progressed online. Who knows, maybe in 2020 I’ll be looking back at this post and thinking how terrible of a writer I was… (nah, I think I’m pretty good so probably not that). Or maybe I’ll just want to look back and know when I wrote it just for the sake of memories (more likely).
If I only went with the /%postname%.html/ I wouldn’t be able to see growth and changes in my writing. Additionally, the permalink structure that I’m using still provides plenty of SEO benefit so that I can get search engine traffic from Google. Not to mention the fact that I have tried a bunch of different structures on various websites that I run and I really don’t think that taking away the date really gives the posts a boost in the rankings. Sure it looks a little bit better without the date (i.e. cleaner), but that’s where it ends – posts with the date can still outrank those that don’t have the date included in the URL.
Always remember to use a good WordPress permalink structure for SEO
Using a good permalink structure for SEO is always going to be beneficial. In conclusion, you want to make sure that you don’t set yourself up for failure in the search engines by failing to include the name of the post in your URLs. I explained this in extensive detail above and gave plenty of examples. Hopefully you are able to learn from my experiences starting out and get yourself off to a good start with your website. Make sure that on all of your websites, you are using search engine optimized permalinks so that you get maximum benefit as far as traffic is concerned.
Place a huge emphasis on writing quality original content
Always remember that permalinks are only half the battle. Being able to write unique original content is the other half of the battle that you need to learn if you want people to actually like your website. Simply re-phrasing other people’s content is a pure cop out way to run a website and just all around lame. If you are a person that does this, you probably shouldn’t be blogging in the first place. At the end of the day, both people and Google like when you write original content that actually helps people. Don’t write for the search engines, write to help people fix a problem and make your content original from other stuff that’s out there.
Google is evolving… keep that in mind
Who knows whether the Google algorithms will change 10, 15, or 20 years from now. At some point in the future it may not even matter what permalink structure you are using for your WordPress website. Maybe at some point the numeric structure and default structure will rank just as high as those using a more optimized structure. Maybe in the future you won’t even need to practice SEO or optimize your website for the search engines. I don’t know what the world will be like in the future.
What I do know is what the world is like right now. And right now, if you want to do well with getting good search engine traffic, you need to make sure that you have optimized your permalink structure. I hope that you found this article beneficial so that you are able to get more search engine traffic in the future. Oh and please be a good Samaritan and share this article with anyone you think could use a little bit of extra help with their permalinks!
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{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Good tip! I think a lot of people leave it at the strange and ugly URLs that most of the CMSs create by default. Apparently, the claim is that this is better for SEO as well. I have been using /%category%/%postname%.html as my permalink structure for a while.