permalink structure Archives - Social Media Guerilla

Quick fix for Jeff Johnson's Plugin will improve its results

A couple of days ago I publicly revealed my secret weapon for social media guerilla when it comes to wordpress plugins – jeff johnson’s free traffic-getting plugin. This cool plugin for wordpress combines major plugins in one package that is easy to install (less than 10 minutes) and can REALLY boost your SEO.

But of course, amongst the 100+ core changes that the plugin makes within WordPress, I dont agree with one – a big one.

I’ve explained before the optimal permalink structure for wordpress – Jeff Johnson’s plugin goes straight to that permalink structure, but changes one major thing.

This is how the plugin structures your permalinks:

/%post_id%/%postname%/

The problem here is in the first part of the structure, which will use your post ID as part of the URL – post IDS carry very little – if any – relevancy to your post. It’s a random number that wordpress assigns each plugin, no matter what your topic is.

So why would you have unnecessary, irrelevant items on your url?

EXACTLY!

Guerilleros, here’s the one thing you should change after installing Jeff Johnson’s SEO plugin:

/%category%/%postname%/

This simple change will add you post’s category into each permalink url – which will now carry a major addition that can heavily influence your rankings. This is what your posts will look like:

http://socialmediaguerilla.com/blog-traffic/quick-permalink-structure-fix-improves-blog-traffic/

Much better than:

Integrating Social Media – Blog RSS to Facebook to Twitter Automatically

Yeah, I though so.

But dont let this quick little fix stop you from getting all the other benefits of Jeff’s plugin:

DOWNLOAD IT NOW – it’s still free!

Ninja SEO trick!

You’re probably familiar with the wordpress permalink structure showing some sort of date on the url, right? Something like this:

If you know a little bit about SEO, you know that the first place search engines look for keywords is in the domain url. As we see in the example above, 2009/07/10 is not a keyword anybody but a horoscope writer would target.

So, how can you change that silly date insertion to a more interesting, SEO-friendly url?

Changing your Permalink Structure

A permalink is the address given to a blog post, which is an abbreviation for “permanent link”. They are permanent because unlike your main domain url, which changes as you write new posts, the url on your permalinks remain the same. Therefore their importance for SEO.

To make changes to your blog’s permalink structure, follow these instructions:

Log into your admin area (blogdomain.con/wp-admin)
Scroll down to Settings >> Permalinks

At that point, you’ll see some WordPress suggestions like these:

This is what WordPress suggests for permalink structure

You don’t want to use any of these. Instead, at the bottom, where you see “Custom Structure”, enter this code:

/%category%/%postname%/

Your configuration should look something like this:

What happens now?

WordPress will use the categories you determine for each post as part of the permalink url, which will include (hopefully) more relevant keywords to your url.

After you’ve finished, your permalink will look like this:

The Difficult Part?

So far, all you had to do was enter a half-a-line code to your wordpress admin area. That was ridicuosly easy.

The part that actually requires some thinking is determining which Categories suit your blog best.

For that, I highly recommend an extensive keyword research.

Make sure your categories:

are relevant to your content,

have decent traffic volume,

are generic enough to hold more than one or two posts.

The key with categories is that they’re not TAGS, but more like umbrellas from where your tags will come out.

After a week of updating all of the permalinks, I experienced a better indexation for most of the keywords within my categories, and an overall blog traffic increase of 20-25%.

It’s definitely worth it.

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