Creating SEO Friendly Page and Post Names

The default name for new WordPress Pages and Posts is taken from the title entry.

In the screenshot below I have created a new page and the title of the page is Test Page.

By default this is used as the page name (or post name if creating posts) and this you can see in the permalink below.

Important: You should note that the permalink may not be displayed until you actually publish the page or change the publishing options.

The page/post name will use the title with all lowercase and hyphens replacing any spaces by clicking edit you can change the name to whatever you want.

The title is usually a search engine friendly name and so I tend to only edit it if it becomes very long.

However that is only part of the story, the actual page/post name has other components and we will look at them separately.

Page Names

The Page name consists of two parts:

Path to page + page name

It is possible to place a page under another page to form a hierarchy just as you do in a standard website. The page at the top of the hierarchy is the parent page.

The name of the parent page becomes part of the filename and so if we have a parent page called Widgets and two pages underneath this page; one called redwidgets and the other bluewidgets. Then the name for these pages would be:

• widgets/redwidgets
• widgets/bluewidgets

The Page name itself i.e. redwidgets is derived from the page title/and or page slug. You should always use a page slug and not just leave it to WordPress to create the name from the page title.

To make it Search engine friendly the page slug should contain your page keywords.

Post Names

Posts appear in several locations and so they have multiple names.

The name of a specific blog entry is called the permalink, which is defined as a URL that points to a specific blogging entry even after the entry has passed from the front page into the blog archives.-- Wikipedia

WordPress offers the ability to configure permalinks in a variety of ways.

The default option uses date and post name, which although it is widely supported, it isn't search engine or user friendly.

 If you are creating web pages then it is normal, and from a search engine and user perspective beneficial, to include the keywords in the page name,

Following the same logic, what is required in blog posts is that the blog page has the keywords in the post page name. To accomplish this you need to change the default permalink configuration.

Changing The Permalink Structure

This should  be done when setting up a new blog or for blogs that are relatively new and don't have many incoming links to old posts.

You need to choose Options>Permalinks from the admin control panel and you will see a list of options. The one I use results in post names like:

http://blog.yoursite.com/adwords-keyword-tool/

which as you can see includes the post keywords (highlighted). The name of the post includes  the post name and is accomplished by setting the Custom option to:

/%year%/%postname%/

as shown in the screenshot below:

Once set you need to click the Update Permalink structure for this to take effect.

Note 1: the WordPress documentation cautions against using certain tags to start the post name and recommends using a numeric field like year. See http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

Note 2: Applies only to post names.

You should also note that for the above to work WordPress needs to be able to edit the .htaccess file. If you don't have access to this file on your server then the method above won't work for you.

The WordPress documentation states that if WordPress can't access the .htaccess file it will display the changes on the screen so you can do it manually.

When working on my WordPress install it didn't do it for me. If you need to manually edit it this is what it should contain .

If you don't have access to the .htaccess file then you can still use a similar format to the above but you will need to proceed your custom tags with index.php.

So that the above would be

index.php/%year%/%postname%/

e.g.

http://blog.yoursite.com/index.php/2009/adwords-keyword-tool/

this is the so called pathinfo method. The structure seems strange and I find the links appear strange but it is search engine friendly.

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