One of the most important and often overlooked aspects of a website is the URL structure. While WordPress offers more than one URL structure, not all options are recommended.
We highly recommend people to follow proper URL structure that will compliment the SEO of your site and help rank your posts. In this post, we are putting up a guide on how to structure a proper URL.
But before we begin you might wonder if WordPress offers more than one URL structure, how can we claim what really is proper URL structure? Well, by proper structure we mean, the one that is SEO friendly.
The one that compliments the SEO of your site. So here’s a step by step guide on how exactly you can set up SEO friendly URL in your website. Read on:
5 Steps To Structure A Proper URL:
Permalink Settings:
The focus of a SEO structure is to be simple and consistent. Once you choose a permalink, you will be using the same permalink for all your posts and pages. Therefore the URL structure needs to be steady and consistent.
There are two types of URLs – static and dynamic. In static, the URL structure remains the same, but dynamic URL changes. Now in the permalink settings of your WordPress dashboard, you need to avoid options like default, date and name, month and name, numeric and chose between post name and custom structure.
Organised URL Structure:
You need to keep it simple as well as organized. When your post appears on SERPs, they should present proper uncluttered URL structure. Ugly structures are not just repulsive and may stop people from visiting the site but also not SEO friendly and may hamper ranking.
So what does an organized URL structure looks like? The URLs must have categories, directories, sub-folders, and must completely avoid sub-domains.
Mind The Keyword:
When it comes to the internet, ranking is all about the keyword. Use of the right keyword is significant in URL structure too. So when you are posting some keyword based post, you must use the keyword in the permalink for search engines to understand what the post is about.
While there may be a number of keywords for you to choose from, don’t go too overboard and stuff the URL with keywords. We recommend using just one (the primary keyword) or two keywords in the URL.
Use HTTPS:
Becoming trustworthy should be one of your goals if you plan to ranks in Google. The search engine tends to rank sites that it thinks is providing value to its reader.
So it’s not a surprise that most websites that rank in the top positions of Googles use HTTPS, therefore switching from HTTP to HTTPS is a really good idea. It sends signals to Google that your website is secure and reliable.
Completely Avoid Special Characters:
SEO-friendly URL structures should not have question marks, exclamation marks, asterisks, ampersands, or apostrophes. For separating words and keywords, instead of using just any random special characters, go for what is considered standard – hyphens.
The primary reason to avoid these special characters is that they cause indexing problems, which, we are pretty sure everyone wants to avoid.
How did you set your website URL structure, let us know in the comment section.
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