Permalinks are URL structures that direct visitors to specific content on your website such as posts, pages, categories, tags and many more.
Permalink sample:
Permalink Structures In WordPress
In order to access the various permalink structures, navigate to the Settings > Permalinks section within your WordPress dashboard.
On the next screen, you will have a view of all the permalink structures:
Plain: It contains the post Id. This permalink structure should not be used if you want to optimize your site for SEO.
Day and Name: Contains the date that the post was published as well as the name of the post.
Month and Name: Contains the month and name of the post
Numeric: Adds only numbers to the URL.
Post name: Renders the name of the post within the URL. This is a bit better for SEO purposes.
Custom Structure: Allows you to come up with your desired permalinks structure.
Permalink Tips For SEO
Maintain a consistent structure
It is quite vital to have consistent permalink structures as this makes it easy for Search Engine bots to crawl your site. Site visitors are also in a position to easily trace your content.
Include a Keyword
Usage of Keywords in permalinks helps search engines identify what your content is about.
You hence need to optimize your slug to ensure that it contains the keyword.
Avoid using the auto generated WordPress slug
When you create for example a new post, WordPress automatically generates a slug for the post. Such a slug may be quite long and doesn’t contain well formatted content.
It is hence advisable to edit the slugs and in turn have an ideal permalink.
It is also advisable to use hyphens within the slug instead of spaces, for easier understanding by humans and search engines.
Keep Them Short
The shorter the permalinks, the better the performance in Search engine results.
It is advisable not to have permalinks with more than 100 characters.
Avoid using “stop words” in your Permalinks
These are words such as: an, amongst, although, and, anywhere, apart.
Such words don’t really help search engines understand your content.
As an example if you have a post title; “10 tips of creating a good WordPress Website”, you can just have the permalink as (“creating WordPress websites”).