A few times, I have come across blogs that are using the dynamic url. I guess they don’t know about SEO friendly urls or they don’t know how to change it. First lets get into the difference and then we get into how to change the urls.
SEO Friendly URL vs. Dynamic URL
The URL is a dynamically generated sequntial number which wordpress uses by default. The number is place after your domain name. The url will look like this http://deneilmerritt.com/?p=713. Google and other search engines spider must crawl my content to know what the article is about. Which means that the url means nothing.
With a SEO friendly URL like this http://deneilmerritt.com/how-to-use-link-demon, the search engines can figure out what the article is about right away. I have a much better chance to be on the first page of google and other search engines with a SEO friendly URL than a Dynamic URL.
Turning On SEO Friendly URL
Turning on SEO friendly URLs is very easy and simple. Go to settings and click on “Permalinks” You have four options to display your url from there. Default, Date and Name (Day/Name or Month/Name), Numeric, or Custom Structure. I choose to use custom because it’s the most SEO friendly. It shows my domain name followed by the post name. The custom structure to use for this is /%postname%/
Before wordpress can update your blog to SEO friendly URL, you will need to make your .htaccess file writable. FTP into your site with any FTP client you use or use the browser like this http://example.com/cpanel, find your .htaccess file in the root folder and CHMOD it to 666. You can set it back to normal after wordpress updates the permalink structure for your blog.
If you not using SEO friendly URLs what are you waiting for?
I hope this helped you with your SEO friendly URLs
{ 14 comments… read them below or add one }
Another tip regarding this:
Make your post URL something like http://www.blog.com/this-is-my-seo-post. You can then change the post slug. (Basically that URL will remain your link, however, you will read a different post title like “This is the only SEO post you will ever need to read”.
What this does is stuff more keywords in important parts of your post to make Google even happier.
Great tip Bobby and another excellent post from Deneil!
Great post Deneil. This is one of the first thing I do every time installing a new Wordpress site. More people should be told about this.
That is what I do when I make a new blog. Greg Ellison
This is indeed one of the first tweaks one should do after installing wordpress. I have found first hand, with what little experience I have with my part-time blogging, that the keywords in the URL indeed play greatly in SEO work.
Hey Den, I would also like to inform you about something I’ve observed in your daily subscription letters these past couple of days. All your emails have its ‘Subject’ as “{!rss_item_title}”. Or, was it meant to display that way?
Nice posting good job, Thanks for sharing.
This is an important tutorial that everyone should know. I got to know about this last year, it was after a few months after I started my blog. Anyway, that’s a great tutorial for beginner who doesn’t know about this.
Regards,
Lee
That is interesting to do in this way, I’ve tried to do this way in my blog and I found this quite useful. One title for reader, and another title for Google for better SEO.
Regards,
Lee
Thanks for the tip Deneil…we are still using dynamic url on our Onesuite blog. I guess its time for a change.
Noel, that was an error on my part. The subject was not suppose to be “{!rss_item_title}”. Thanks for telling me, I fixed it asap.
Glad you liked it Nilesh.
Great job sharing this with everyone Deneil. I remember you suggested I change my URL structure a while back when we were talking on MSN. It’s something I probably would have not picked up on if you had not told me the benefits of making my URLs SEO friendly.
How about the Optional below the Custom.
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Optional
If you like, you may enter a custom prefix for your category URIs here. For example, /taxonomy/tags would make your category links like http://example.org/taxonomy/tags/uncategorized/. If you leave this blank the default will be used.
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What do you think about the Optional (with tag then blog title) URL?
You welcome Michael. I guess it is time for change. Who knows how much traffic you missing from using dynamic urls. Let me know how it effects your rankings for your given keywords.