Tutorial: Updating WordPress Permalinks for Best SEO Practices & User Experience
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Hello, my name is Negative SEO. Welcome to the NegativeSEO.com WordPress 101 Tutorial. For this tutorial, I’m going to talk about what permalinks are and why they are important for your WordPress website.
A permalink is a permanent URL to a webpage, a blog post, a category or any other type of post on your website. A permalink is what another website might use to link to a page, an article on your website, or how you might send out a webpage in an email. The URL to each post should be permanent which is where the name permalink came from.
First, lets login to our WordPress dashboard to view our WordPress websites current permalink structure, as well as other options.
Accessing the permalink settings for your WordPress website is easy. Simply hover over the settings menu and click on “Permalinks.”
Here you’ll see the different types of permalink offered through your WordPress dashboard. First, is the plain or ugly default permalink. The second type of permalink includes the day and post name. The third includes the month and post name. The fourth option assigns a numeric value to the URL. Last, is my favorite. It’s the better permalink for search engine optimization. It’s also a better solution to tell your readers about what that page is before they even click on it.
Let’s go back to our homepage. I’ve created a demo blog titled “Better WordPress SEO Tutorials.” When I click on the blog post notice how the URL is question mark p equals 4. Think about what a user might think if it saw this on a search engine results page. Now, let’s go back to the “Permalink Setting” menu and update it to “Post Name” and check back and see how the URL now looks.
Notice the difference? Having a clean, well-structured permalink is not only better for website users, it’s a known SEO signal and included in SEO best practices.
Thanks for watching this WordPress 101 Tutorial. For more check out my website seanhakes.com or subscribe to my YouTube channel.