The main purpose of your website is to provide High-Quality Content i.e SEO optimized content for both the visitor and the Search Engine. The Prior website and marketing strategies were designed with SEO friendly URL and Search Engines in mind only.
Today social sharing plays an important role in website ranking and to get huge traffic from it. If you have a new website then going with Social Sharing is the best way but search engines should not be ignored either. Because all High authorized website gets its 70% of traffic only from organic search. So we don’t neglect the Search engine part.
SEO friendly URL is one of the major parts of the Search engine Optimization (SEO). Today we learn, what is URL, Importance of SEO friendly URL, and its characteristic. Why and how they play an important role in website ranking and to get a huge amount of traffic.
The web page has its own name and place in the world of the web. This place is defined by its URL which is essentially its address. The simplest way to identify a URL is to take a look at the address bar when you open a web page. The whole line displayed in that Address Bar is the URL of that web page.
In simple words, when we search anything in google Search box and press enter then what happen? Google put some data on the screen related to your search. When we click on our topic than a page or website open. So what is the URL of that page? Any guesses, the address in the Browser Bar is the URL of that Particular page. So now you have a little bit idea, What we are talking about?
What is URLs?
URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator and is used to specify addresses on the World Wide Web i.e www. A URL is the fundamental network identification for any resource connected to the web. In simple words, it is a link to any website.
What is an SEO Friendly URL?
SEO-Friendly-URLs contain keywords that explain the article, and they are easy to read by both visitor and search engines. They also improve your chances to rank higher in search engines by make attraction with your Visitor. We will talk about it later.
Normal URL:- https://www.hitechwork.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=2&ie=UTF
SEO-friendly-URL:- https://www.hitechwork.com/change-seo-friendly-urls-wordpress/
Tell me which is most easy to remember and understand for you. Can you guess, which URL is telling you about what they contain in itself?
Importance of SEO-friendly URL
Google is giving more importance to the URL of a website for indexing and SEO purpose. If you have an SEO friendly URL structure, then you can easily rank in search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask, Yandex etc.
For example;
When we search in Google, We type words i.e Alphabet, not Numerical value maximum time. So if you make your Website URL SEO friendly than the chances of appearance of your Page in the SERPs is increased. This way you can Rank higher in google. Maximum peoples use good focus keyword i.e Long Tail Keyword in the URL and try to rank higher and higher by using SEO Onpage Optimization technique.
WordPress by default URL:
http://184.154.163.210/~hitechwork/?p=123
SEO Friendly URL:
http:www.hitechwork.com/how-to-make-seo-friendly-url-in-wordpress/
Note:- If it’s your website URL, then it’s not SEO friendly URL. At the end of the article, I will explain how you can change Default WordPress URL.
This link is shown in your post title URL and it will help your visitors and google to know what your article is about and in this way you will get a huge traffic to your website. You can see my Google Analytic report 34% of the traffic is coming from organic traffic just because of SEO friendly URL and SEO Onpage Optimization Technique.
Characteristics of SEO-Friendly-URLS
- It is meaningful and describes what a page or post is about
- It has ‘-’ to separate each and every word that make up the URL
- doesn’t include unnecessary characters and it’s not too lengthy. Recommended length of the URL is 60 characters by google.
Here are a few examples of good and bad formatted URLS.
Good
https://www.hitechwork.com/what-is-seo
https://www.hitechwork.com/wordpress-seo-for-beginners-108
https://www.hitechwork.com/seo/how-to-make-money-online-with-wordpress
Bad
https://www.hitechwork.com/what_is_seo
https://www.hitechwork.com/sessionid=123&var=1&content=SEO
https://www.hitechwork.com/dp/B00KDRUCJY/ref=pf_rd_s=desktop-hero-kindlA&pf_rd_r=13
How to Make SEO friendly URL in WordPress
WordPress has a number of options for configuring your URLS (also called Permalinks) and you can find these under SETTINGS.
There are a number of pre-defined settings you can choose but you can also select ‘custom structure’ and define your own URL structure.
Meaning of URL structure
- Plain is a default wordPress setting and it is not SEO-friendly.
- Day and name option is somewhat SEO-friendly as it has the post name in it. However, with dates, the URL becomes too lengthy. But more importantly, after some time your content seems outdated, even if you regularly update it. Similarly,
- The Month and name option also runs the risk of being dated.
- Day and Month name option is best for a website, which related to News. Because Date and month are more important in news.
- Numeric is not good for SEO purpose because it not plays any role in SEO. but to hide content from hacker beat cue it is difficult to find.
- Post name option is the most SEO-friendly because it is short and pretty.
- If you are running a larger publication, then you can use a custom structure that can also be SEO-friendly.
In order to use a custom URL structure, you will need to add special tags in the custom structure box. For example, we use:
/%category%/%postname%/
Note:- how each tag is wrapped between percent signs(%). Also notice the trailing slashes / before, after, and between the tags.
Select Post Name as your SEO friendly URL because in feature if your shift post from one category to another then your social sharing and SEO point, not a lose.
Let me explain how?
https:/www.hitechwork.com/catogery_1/post_name/
To
https:/www.hitechwork.com/catogery_2/post_name/
Google consider this two URL totally different from one another. So if you shit your post from Catogery_1 to Catogery_2 or vice versa. You lose the rank of that post. But if your URL is only post_name then you can change category without any risk. The category also creates duplicate content in WordPress. On hitechwork, i use Post_name as my Seo Friendly URL and use Noindex Nofollow meta tag for the category so that it does not create duplicate content in my WordPress blog. For Better result remove WordPress category and Tags from search Engine
Creating Custom URL Structure with Available Tags
There are so many of other combinations you can create using tags. Here is a list of tags that you can use to create your own custom URL structure
- %year% – The year of the post, four digits, for example, 2016 year.
- %monthnum% – Month of the year, for example, 12-month number.
- %day% – Day of the month, for example, 31 days.
- %hour% – Hour of the day, for example, 12 hours.
- %minute% – Minute of the hour, for example, 60 sec.
- %second% – Second of the minute, for example, 60 minute.
- %postname% – A sanitized version of the title of the post.
- %post_id% – The unique ID of the post, for example, #423
- %category% – A sanitized version of the category name. Nested sub-categories appear as nested directories in the URI.
- %author% – A sanitized version of the author name.
Warning If your site has been running for more than 6 months, then please don’t change your permalink structure. By changing your permalink structure on an established site, you will lose all of your social media share counts and run the risk of losing your existing SEO Ranking. If you must change your permalink structure, then hire a professional, so they can set up proper redirects. You’ll still lose your social share counts on the pages. The choice is yours. But I personally recommended going for it. It makes a good impression of your site.
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