Enabling Search Engine Friendly URLs In WordPress
Having an optimized URL made specifically for search engines can help the search engine to understand what your site is about. While I do not know of any studies that have measured how many people look at the title, description and URL of a webpage in the search engine results, I do know that major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN bold keywords in your listing that were searched for.
When WordPress is first installed and configured it uses variables inside of the URL instead of words. A page or post URL would look like http://jarretcade.net/wpthemesupport/?p=18 instead of http://jarretcade.net/wpthemesupport/search-engine-friendly-urls. So how do we go about turning the variable in the URL into the title of the post?
Modifying the permalinks structure
A permalink in WordPress refers to the URL of the post or page. Thus, in order to change it to make it more friendly to search engines we are going to have to modify how it is displayed. Fortunately, the developers of WordPress have made this very easy and doesn’t require you to have any coding knowledge.
Log into your WordPress Admin Dashboard and click the down arrow on the Settings section if it isn’t already expanded. From there, click on the Permalinks link so that we can make our changes to the URL. You will notice that WordPress already provides you with some pre-configured permalink structures for your URLs as well as allowing you to create a custom setup. Select the Custom Structure radio button and then enter %postname% into the input field.
Using %postname% removes the variable in the URL and replaces it with the title of the post. You can also choose to use one of the pre-configured structures that WordPress already provides.
That is pretty much it. It doesn’t require a whole lot of work or effort in order to change the permalink structure. If you are looking to increase your visibility in the search engines, changing the permalink structure from the default setting to something different can really make a difference.
Feedback!
If you read this post and understood it great! Let me know in the comments below. If you are still having issues and can't get it figured out, you are more than welcome to leave a comment or send me an email using the contact form and I'll do what I can to help!