Just starting your first WordPress blog or ready to hit publish? Be sure to set up your URLs best for both Search Engines and your readers.
If you have a WordPress site, be sure to set up your posts using permalinks.
Have you ever been to a site that has something that looks like a little messy, like:
- https://websiteurl.com/?p=234
- https://websiteurl.com/archives/431
- https://websiteurl.com/2014/10/best-seo-practices
Some of these are just references to pages, while others include the date of the post. But they could look like this:
- https://websiteurl.com/best-seo-practices
As a reader, which one instinctively looks the most straightforward? Which one makes you most likely to click? What about the date in the one, while its handy at first, as time passes, confidence in the material becomes more questionable. Right?
It’s a generally accepted best practice to use the permalinks to match your content. Doing this will give the reader and search engines a logical hint of the topic of your post.
So double-check your WordPress setup by looking under Settings > Permalinks. You’ll want to have the Permalink Settings set to “Post name.”
Initially doing this can be helpful as well, so that you don’t have to worry about redirects of already ranked pages.
If you do end up changing your permalink settings afterward, use a redirect plugin to ‘catch’ the users trying to hit the indexed, bookmarked, or otherwise still accessible social media links out in the wild.
