Improve Your SEO with Thoughtful Permalinks

by Jason Unger, Founder

Insights / Website Development / Improve Your SEO with Thoughtful Permalinks

You know that SEO is more than just one thing.

SEO is content; it’s accessibility; it’s technical fundamentals; it’s security.

SEO is everything.

Let’s focus today on some low-hanging fruit you can use to improve your SEO: permalinks.

What are Permalinks?

Permalink is the fancy name for the URL of any given page on your website (the “permanent link”).

In WordPress, the default permalink structure uses the ID of the page or post as a query; i.e. https://www.digital.ink/?p=123. While that’s totally functional, it doesn’t provide any useful information to either users or search engines.

If you were to see that URL listed, you wouldn’t have any hints about what’s on that page – and the more information you have about a given link, the better decision you can make about its relevance to you.

Way back in 1999, the usability gurus at the Nielsen Norman Group wrote about what makes a usable URL … and the fundamentals haven’t changed. Here’s what they said:

The URL will continue to be part of the Web user interface for several more years, so a usable site requires:

• a domain name that is easy to remember and easy to spell
• short URLs
• easy-to-type URLs
• URLs that visualize the site structure
• URLs that are “hackable” to allow users to move to higher levels of the information architecture by hacking off the end of the URL
• persistent URLs that don’t change

In WordPress, our general recommendation is to include part of the page or post’s title in the URL in order to fulfill these goals, using a permalink structure that includes the post’s name. But that requires a thoughtful approach.

How to Create Thoughtful Permalinks

When creating a thoughtful permalink, you want to make it as easy as possible for both people and search engines to assume information about what’s on the page.

Usually, that means taking part (or all) of the page’s title and using it in the URL. WordPress does this automatically, translating the title into the permalink for your page or post when it’s saved.

That’s a great place to start, but sometimes your page title is filled with unnecessary information – words that may be necessary for the page title, but don’t add value to the URL itself. These can include “stop” words – “a”, “the”, “in”, “on”, etc. These words are crucial when you’re writing a full sentence or phrase for your title, but they can easily be assumed when you’re focused on the key words that can be used in the URL.

For example, the title of this post – “Improve Your SEO with Thoughtful Permalinks” – doesn’t need the words “your” or “with” when trying to deliver the main point. Hence, our permalink is /blog/thoughtful-permalinks-improve-seo.

Google, for their part, says that removing stop words doesn’t play a huge role in SEO, but the clearer you can make your URLs for people, the more usable they are – which is all that Google really wants.

If your page title spells out an acronym, you may want to only use the acronym in the URL – especially if it’s a long phrase. Just like with good-looking content on a page, your permalink has to be scannable, and if it looks too long, you’ll lose people.

Pages, Child Pages, and URLs in Subfolders

But what about pages in WordPress, and specifically child pages whose parent page is included in the permalink – how should they be handled?

If you’re creating a page that has a parent page or lives in a subfolder, or if your blog post URLs automatically include other key words – like the post’s category – then you have to consider ALL of the words in your URL – not just your individual page.

For example, if you are organization has an “About” section, and you’ve created a page in that section called “About Our Mission” – your URLs might look like this:

• myorganization.org/about
• myorganization.org/about/about-our-mission

The “About Our Mission” page URL now has 2 instances of the word “about” in its URL – which is totally unnecessary. A better permalink for would be /about/our-mission.

It’s not complicated, but it makes a huge difference.

And while this may be obvious, you can’t use the same permalink for multiple pages; when you try to do this in WordPress, you’ll automatically get a -2 added to the URL. We’ve seen this with organizations that run events, and host the same event multiple times. Don’t settle for that! Invest the time in developing a unique permalink, such as including the event’s date.

When you’re creating new pages or posts on your site, create thoughtful permalinks by sticking to these rules:

• use human (and machine) readable language
• include key words that provide scannable information about the page
• remove unnecessary “stop” and duplicate words

Have questions about thoughtful permalinks? Contact us and let’s chat.