Format your WordPress blog URL for better SEO

Many businesses and private WordPress blog owners make the mistake by not formating their blog’s URL to be search engine friendly. By optimising your WordPress blog’s URL for search engines, you can enhance your visibility on the search engine result pages (SERP) quite significantly.

Even though there’s a couple of good WordPress search engine optimatisation (SEO) plugins available for optimising your titles and meta content, optimising every bit of your blog helps making it more visible on the search engines.

The default blog URL

The default installation of WordPress creates your URL’s with a structure of: “domain.com/?p=1 and domain.com/?p=2“. Using this URL structure clearly shows that you are not placing targeted keywords in the URL’s of your blog posts and pages.

With a simple tweak of your WordPress blog’s settings you can create optimised URL’s like: “domain.com/title-of-the-post/ or domain.com/category-name/title-of-the-post/“.

Doing it this way you can include keywords in your URL’s and search engines can directly determine what the page is about.

How to create optimised WordPress blog URL’s

So the big question is… how do you change your WordPress blog’s URL to be search engine friendly? Find simple steps below on how to optimize your blog URL’s:

1. Login to your WordPress dashboard – (usually http://www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin/ or http://www.yourdomain.co.za/wp-admin.php)
2. Navigate to ‘Settings’;
3. and then ‘Permalinks’.
4. Check the “Custom” field….
In the custom field of the Permalinks section, add this /%postname%/ or /%category%/%postname%/ (often it just gives you the choice to click a button)
5. Pat yourself on the back for getting a bit technical!
6. The URL name will be shown under the heading in each new article that you write and can be edited.

Following these simple steps will solve your problem by obtaining search engine friendly URL’s on your WordPress blog. Every little bit of SEO helps.