Permalink structure helps search engines crawl your website.  

Local and national search engine optimization is more critical than ever in today’s competitive digital world. Part of this optimization includes permalink structure best practices. Knowing the best permalink structure allows any brand to optimize their site in hopes of ranking in the top positions.  

A technical part of SEO strategy is knowing how permalinks affect SEO and how to optimize your site’s permalink structure. 

An example of a permalink:

Https://Algorithmicglobal.com/blog/

What is the purpose of a Permalink?

Permalinks help search engines know how relevant a page is to other topics on the web. Permalinks are added to the search engine index and help rank a website with specific keywords. When creating a permalink structure, it is necessary to use relevant keywords to make it simpler for a search engine to scan and crawl the website. 

Three steps to create an indexable permalink? 

Now that we have gone over how search engines index your permalinks keywords, let’s look into creating searchable permalinks. There are three steps in creating permalinks: 

1. Determine the purpose of your content.
   Knowing what the content is about will allow the permalink to contain targeted keywords.
2. Update for crawling purposes.
   Separating the words in your permalink with hyphens will help search engines like Google process your page faster than having keywords jumbled together.
   Example: https://yourwebsite.com/kids-lunch
   Instead of: https://yourwebsite.com/kidslunch
3. Check the length
   The top-ranking permalinks should not have more than 59 characters. If possible, it is better to create short URLs to help search engines index your pages. 

When you follow these three steps, the process of creating a permalink will become more accessible for the search engine to crawl and for the end-user to navigate your compelling content. For example, a strong permalink structure that would fit a blog post about parents packing the most nutritionist lunch for their children would look like 

https://yourwebsite.com/healthy-lunch-for-children.

Another benefit of a compelling permalink structure is that it allows visitors to share your content more easily with others. 

How to structure your WordPress URLs

On WordPress, the default permalinks contain several random letters and numbers. A new WordPress blog post structure is generated by the ID number of the post, which does more harm than good because the URL does not include any distinct keywords.

They usually look like this:

https://yourwebsite.com/?p=123

This type of permalink structure makes it difficult for a visitor to remember what the content is about after reading. A simple URL structure allows visitors to recall the permalink and share it with others. A simple WordPress permalink structure that supports the post name to the domain name should look:

https://yourwebsite.com/post-name

This URL structure provides visitors–and those the post is shared with–a quick identifiable way to know the topic of the page. As mentioned before, a search keyword in the permalink helps generate organic traffic.

How to Change Your Permalink Structure on WordPress

1. Log in to your WordPress dashboard.
2. Click on Settings(On the left-hand side)
3. Click on Permalinks.
4. Select your desired permalink structure. 
5. Click Save Changes.

A suggestion that we have recently found useful with SEO and blogging is to limit the number of categories topics. We have found that one category filled with all of the posts is best for search engine crawling and ensures the site continuously stays organized.   

Now you know how to change your permalink structure from the generic WordPress recommendations successfully. It is essential to fix any pages that were updated before these changes to avoid broken links being crawled. It is best practice to set up permanent 301 redirects for broken links. 301 Redirects will automatically send visitors to your new URLs. Fortunately, Yoast premium quickly processes 301 redirects. 

How to Edit a WordPress Blog Permalink Using Yoast

Yoast SEO makes changing a permalink simple when publishing a new post in WordPress. At the bottom of each post, Yoast has created a spot titled “slug” highlighted below. In this section, you can change the permalink to include your SEO keywords, post title, and other relevant information.

Final Notes on Permalink Structure

When developing your SEO strategy, you must include a permalink structure. Relevant permalinks allow search engines to crawl a site quickly and identify the topic on the page or blog post. It is best to update the structure as shown above to generate more organic traffic and offer easy sharing for visitors.