SEO, as you already know, consists of optimizing all elements of web pages, including the URLs of the latter, so that they are more understandable by people and search engines.
Changing the structure of permalinks (that is, the way URLs appear) means changing all the paths of the website's content at once, so you must proceed with great caution to avoid damaging the entire situation.
It may be necessary to change the site's permalinks (permanent URLs) to provide a better navigation structure for users, but this action has a direct influence on how search engines index content.
SEO-friendly URLs should be understandable to readers and search engines, so if they are not correct from the beginning, you must work to improve them. If possible, they should be short and easy to remember by special rewriting.
Default addresses contain suboptimal numeric characters that do not communicate anything to search engines, such as:
www.sito.it/?p=n
Our goal is to make the URL structure meaningful in the page content.
There is no absolute optimal choice, as the most advantageous permanent link configuration depends very much on the case at hand. For example, if you have many articles related to a specific topic, you can have the convenience of treating them all as belonging to a category highlighted in the URL (e.g. www.sito.it/seo/ article if you have multiple forms of websites) . marketing to distinguish ) or, if your URLs are very long, it is better to opt for a www.sito.it/nomarticolo structure to save space and make the paths more readable).
How to set up permalinks correctly
The configuration of URLs is a usability dictate from SEO that must be followed scrupulously both to facilitate navigation for users and to specify the meaning of the page to search engines more easily.
There are several permalink structures at your disposal from which you can choose the most appropriate one for your needs.
A convenient structure is /post-name (article name) or a larger one like category /post-name (category and article name).
However, if you want to maintain the category, remember to opt for short terms that therefore do not make the URLs too long.
Choosing the permalink structure is a step to preferably take when starting a web project, so as not to have to deal with redirects to apply to all content.
Setting them up from WordPress is very easy.
From the WordPress dashboard, go to Settings -> Permalink (web address www.sito.com/wp-admin/options-permalink.php).
Among the available configurations we can choose:
- Simple - the default combination of letters and numbers
- Date and name : appropriate to the contents related to the date on which they are published
- Month and name : recommended if the blog has a strong temporal connotation (eg you always publish news referring to the same topic)
- Numeric : a string of numbers (always better than the simple preset but still meaningless)
- Category and item name - The structure indicating the category name and post title.
- Article name – The “post-name” structure that indicates the title of the post.
- Custom structure
We can choose the “Article Rules” item if we want a route like www.sito.com/artnomarticolo to appear.
In this way we can host precious keywords in the page path, useful for making the paths of our pages very understandable.
If you want to enter the category, you can choose Custom Structure and enter the words
/% category% /% postname% /.
This version can be further investigated to accommodate subcategories as well, and the result will be something like www.sito.com/categoria/sottocategoria/nomearticolo
I advise you to omit articles and conjunctions from the URL, as Google can understand the meaning of sentences very well even without these additions.
From WordPress settings you can also access tag and category settings, but you can leave them in default mode:
www.sito.it/categoria/nomecategoria
www.sito.it/tag/nometag
or choose the structure that you consider most appropriate given your needs.
How to Choose Optimal Permalinks for SEO
As we said, regarding the optimization of permalinks on the SEO side, everyone has their own recipe. Personally, I think keeping URLs as short as possible can only bring benefits, both for search engines and for readers who have to memorize them. So I go for an “item name” structure which is very intuitive. In addition, long URLs are usually cropped in social media previews so they are not very suitable in any case.
By choosing the perfect URL, you can also evaluate whether you want the referring version of your site to be the one with www or not.
This distinction can also be applied in Search Console, in the items Site Settings and Preferred Domain, also to define the site you should consider the main version with or without HTTPS: as you know, Google strongly supports this practice and therefore you should configure the URLs from the start of the project to take this into account.
If your site is already started, you should pay close attention to this practice, since changing URLs can affect positioning and generate 404 errors.
From the .htaccess file you can configure the redirects so as not to lose precious positioning.
The Yoast plugin satisfies this need and by filling out a short form with all the instructions to follow, you will be able to adjust the redirects of the entire structure automatically.
A good practice in these cases is to adapt internal links to point to the actual versions of the pages, in order to minimize the need for redirects.
WordPress offers you many intuitive solutions to manage the redirect issues you face when you change the structure of multiple articles (for example, when you change the version of permalinks from “article name” to “category”). »). such as the convenient Redirection. However, I would say that the benefits of implementing the category in the URL have diminished today compared to what they used to be, so I don't see all these incentives to implement a longer structure than they should.
As you can see, working on URLs is another important strategy to follow that, along with all other SEO optimization procedures, contributes to our goal of reaching the first position on Google.
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