Permalinks are not something that most people think about when they are establishing their blogs or websites. That, more often than not, turns out to be a huge mistake. When I got started blogging on this site 3 years ago, nobody told me about permalinks. As a result, I am pretty much stuck on a structure that I hope I could change. Truth of the matter is; permalinks are important. They are something that visitors to your site are likely to see and read. They are also important for SEO. This article shows you the best permalink structure for SEO in the year 2020.
What are permalinks?
The word permalink is short for permanent link. Permalinks are URLs that are permanent for your posts and pages. Each post or page has it’s own permalink.
Can they be changed?
Yes, permalinks can be changed. Doing so is a simple matter of clicking on a few settings in your WordPress dashboard. However, the result of changing permalinks on your site can be drastic. Some people have reported drops in their search engine rankings after altering their permalinks.
Available Permalink Structures
In WordPress, the following are some of the available permalink structures.
https://networkbees.com/?p=123 |
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https://networkbees.com/2020/01/19/sample-post/ |
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https://networkbees.com/2020/01/sample-post/ |
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https://networkbees.com/archives/123 |
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https://networkbees.com/sample-post/ |
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https://networkbees.com |
Avoid dates in your permalinks
One rule of thump is that, unless you are a news site or unless it is absolutely necessary, you should avoid dates in your permalinks. As you can see, my own site has dates in the permalinks. Nobody told me that this was inadvisable when launching the site. I only discovered the problem while trying to republish some posts. Doing so meant that I had a different date in the permalink and another for the publication date.
Best Permalink Structure for SEO
In my view, the best permalinks structure is the “Post name.” Its simple enough without causing you problems. Now, for SEO purposes, you do need to make sure that you have included your target keywords in your URL. That way, they get reflected in your permalinks. Doing this is great since it allows search engines and your readers to immediately know what a post is all about.
Why I haven’t changed my permalinks structure
As you may have perceived, I am not really happy with the structure of my permalinks. So, why haven’t I simply changed them? Truth of the matter is doing so has the potential to create a host of problems. For one thing, all the internal links will get broken. More importantly, all external links will redirect to a 404 error page. Now, with the way that I have sweated to build backlinks, it doesn’t seem really worth it to change the permalinks structure on this site.
Of course, it’s something that can be done and I may well do it at a later day. A lot of people out there claim to have found ways of changing the permalinks structures on their sites while avoiding the problems that I have mentioned here.
