Permalink Settings – Optimizing the Onpage SEO
The structure of permalinks plays a very important role in the on-page SEO of the WordPress blog. Changing the settings can get you a good amount of traffic from search engines. Usually, new bloggers forget to change the structure in starting, and later it becomes too late because the indexed pages will be having a different permalink and when they change the permalinks all the indexed pages will give a page not found an error. So, remember to change your permalink structure before making the first post.
In case, you forgot to change your permalinks at the starting of your blog, don’t worry, you are not that late just change the permalink structure and install a WordPress plugin “Permalinks Moved Permanently”. This will help you in getting rid of the problems.
The default permalink looks like http://www.xyz***blog.com/p=123, this kind of permalink structure is not good for SEO, a better structure can have keywords in the link which will be good for search engine rankings. Now, to change the permalink structure, open your admin panel and move on to Permalinks (/wp-admin/options-permalink.php) and change the structure to one of the following:
a). /%category%/%postname%/
This will show your category and post title in the link for example:
https://walletguru.net/finance/promoting-your-blog-on-facebook/
In the above link, “finance” in the category, and “promoting-your-blog-on-facebook” is the title of the post.
(But this link will not work because I have the settings which are there in b).
b). /%postname%/
This will only show the post title in the link, example:
https://walletguru.net/promoting-your-blog-on-facebook/
If you will be using one of the above permalink settings then you will surely get a good amount of traffic coming from search engines. You can also try other combinations, 4 options are already there.
I hope this post might be helpful for WordPress bloggers.