SEO for Wordpress Part 3: Filenames

This is the third part of my series on SEO for Wordpress. The first two parts were on title tags and header tags.

Filenames Important To Search

Since the filename of a page is an important factor in search engine algorithms it is important that we name our pages appropriately.

Ideally we want the main keywords of our post title separated by dashes. For example, a good name for this page would be ‘wordpress-file-names’ or ’seo-wordpress-file-names’.

By default Wordpress uses filenames that have question marks and lots of numbers in them. This is not good.

Custom URL Structures

Wordpress does allow us to create custom URL structures that are more search friendly. In your Wordpress administrative panel click on Options and then Permalinks. Under Common options select Custom. Here we can tell Wordpress how we want our filenames to look.

I recommend using the following:
/%category%/%postname%/

This will give us the domain name followed by the category followed by the name of the post with the words separated by dashes for a filename.

This page would have the following filename: http://www.virtualmarketingblog.com/seo-wordpress/seo-for-wordpress-part-3-filenames/

This is a lot better naming structure than the default, but we can still do better.

Post Slug

The Post Slug panel on the post editing screen allows us to create a custom filename for our post. A dash is put between each word we put in the Post Slug and used as our filename. For this article I put ‘wordpress file names’ in the Post Slug.

The page would have the following filename: http://www.virtualmarketingblog.com/20070807/wordpress-file-names/

Changing the permalink structure for existing blogs will cause the filenames of all your posts to change. This can hurt you in the search engines more than what you gain by having a search friendly filename. I recommend starting with the custom permalinks on new blogs only.

If your permalink structure is set to the default, you can use the Post Slug to make future filenames search friendly.

Besides making our filenames search friendly the custom permalink and Post Slug features can improve the aesthetics, usability, and forward-compatibility of our links.

More SEO for Wordpress:
SEO for Wordpress Part 1: Title Tags
SEO for Wordpress Part 2: Header Tags
SEO for Wordpress Part 3: Filenames
SEO for Wordpress Part 4: Meta Description
SEO for Wordpress Part 5: Duplicate Content
SEO for Wordpress Part 6: Organizing Category Pages

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Good stuff. I’m looking forward to the rest of this series.

Very useful post, keep them coming, thanks!

I always use “/%category%/%postname%/” for my custom permalinks. It makes sense, you have your general topic in the category part as well as the more specific post title. Those are the two things with keyword potential not the date.

Ive never tried your method though to see any differences so i dont know which is better. I cant image it making too much a difference.

We can use Advanced Permalinks plugin to change permalink structure without affecting any existing posts. Any attempts to access posts in the old permalink structure will be
automatically redirected to the new URL