Best Permalinks for SEO - Custom structure vs Postname
-
Good Morning Moz peeps,
I am new to this but intending on starting off right! I have heard a wealth of advice that the "post name" permalink structure is the best one to go with however... i am wondering about a "custom structure" combing the "post name" following the below example structure:
Www.professionalwarrior.com/bodybuilding/%postname/
Where "professional" and "bodybuilding" is my focus/theme/keywords of my blog that i want ranked.
Thanks a mill,
RO
-
I try to stay relevant to the
tag of the article or use the Title of the article.
It is not about stuffing keywords in places. It is about relevancy.
Here is a cornerstone article:
https://www.brightvessel.com/21-tips-woocommerce-website-design
One of my supporting article:
https://www.brightvessel.com/multiplying-e-commerce-site-conversions/
At the bottom: I added a link.
If you like this post, check out 21 Tips for WooCommerce Website Design
For me, I like things to be understandable and relevant to each article I link to, which works. I would use the mindset that your providing information and how you link that information needs to display that way.
-
Would love to hear what structure you use Judd
Thanks,
RO
-
Thanks Judd - it does. I feel like categories are not the way to go for me either.
How would you link to cornerstone article by means of a hyperlink in the sub blog post?
What permalink structure do you use?
Thanks
RO
-
Hi,
Without diving in and doing a whole SEO breakdown. Here is an example of how I could explain what I would do for my site.
My Corner Strone Article:
21 Tips on How to Build a Good Homepage Design
Permalink: /web-design/21-tips-homepage-design
Category: web-design
I choose "not" to add my categories to my permalinks to make them short. The shorter the URL the easier to remember and the better you rank. In this example, I added a category.
On the URLs, try not to use "Stop Words" which are "Of, the, that, is, etc."
Additional articles linking back to the cornerstone article.
1. Title: What Makes a Good Website Header Design?
Permalink: /web-design/good-website-header-design
2. Title: Example of Website Design Banner Ads
Permalink: /web-design/website-design-banner-ads
3. Title: Important Design Elements for a Website Footer
Permalink: /web-design/design-elements-website-footer
Each article would have supporting information which would link back to an overall article.
Make sense?
-
Thank you Judd!
This is great advice. My content wouldn't be a popular search on the internet such as the abundance of say beauty blogs or recipes/lifestyle blogs but yet i feel the topics/keywords i would write about could be somewhat repetitive and quite a niche/narrow focus.
Wondering if you could give me your opinion of what you think about the video/permalink strategy in the video above?
Really appreciate it.
RO
-
If you have several articles pertaining to the same topic then consider making the best one the "Cornerstone Article"
https://yoast.com/what-is-cornerstone-content/
"Cornerstone content plays a significant role in any SEO strategy. It can be rather hard to rank for search terms that are very popular. A cornerstone approach could help you tackle those competitive search terms. If you write a lot of articles about similar blog posts, you need to tell Google which one is the most important. Otherwise, you’ll be competing with your content for a place in the search results. If you provide the proper internal linking structure between your posts, you can show Google which article is the most important."
-
Thank you for responding with these great supplementing articles. Very helpful! Which leads me to follow up questions if you dont mind. I wasn't so much getting to using categories but more what is desribed in the video below circa 3.50 mins in.
Its more of a one time static "category" for the rest of your blogs life to drive key words/ranking. The more i read I'm thinking this could be determental. Or a srtoke of genus?
Second question.... related to point #4 in the first article ( Multiple URLS serving the same content); i feel like my blog posts could be construed as containing the same information/ key words over and over as they will be drilled down detail into very narrow focused/niche content. Would this be considered duplication content?
Thank you very much for you response and guidance!
-
RO,
This is a great article:
https://moz.com/blog/15-seo-best-practices-for-structuring-urls
See:
#6
Shorter URLs are, generally speaking, preferable. You don't need to take this to the extreme, and if your URL is already less than 50-60 characters, don't worry about it at all. But if you have URLs pushing 100+ characters, there's probably an opportunity to rewrite them and gain value.
I tend to not have a category in my URL and see this practice most of the time when surfing around.
Also, see this article:
https://yoast.com/wordpress-seo-url-permalink/
See:
Should I use the category in my permalink structure?
If your domain name is nice and short and you use short, yet descriptive category names, you can easily include a category in your permalink structure which can benefit your website, but beware: if you end up with a lengthy slug and category name, it will make sharing the URL more difficult and won’t have much added value in Google.
If you decide to use categories in your permalink structure, make sure that you only select one category per post. For some more information regarding using categories in your permalink structure, I advise you to watch the following video by Matt on this section.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
URL structure - Page Path vs No Page Path
We are currently re building our URL structure for eccomerce websites. We have seen a lot of site removing the page path on product pages e.g. https://www.theiconic.co.nz/liberty-beach-blossom-shirt-680193.html versus what would normally be https://www.theiconic.co.nz/womens-clothing-tops/liberty-beach-blossom-shirt-680193.html Should we be removing the site page path for a product page to keep the url shorter or should we keep it? I can see that we would loose the hierarchy juice to a product page but not sure what is the right thing to do.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ashcastle0 -
URL Structure & Best Practice when Facing 4+ Sub-levels
Hi. I've spent the last day fiddling with the setup of a new URL structure for a site, and I can't "pull the trigger" on it. Example: - domain.com/games/type-of-game/provider-name/name-of-game/ Specific example: - arcade.com/games/pinball/deckerballs/starshooter2k/ The example is a good description of the content that I have to organize. The aim is to a) define url structure, b) facilitate good ux, **c) **create a good starting point for content marketing and SEO, avoiding multiple / stuffing keywords in urls'. The problem? Not all providers have the same type of game. Meaning, that once I get past the /type-of-game/, I must write a new category / page / content for /provider-name/. No matter how I switch the different "sub-levels" around in the url, at one point, the provider-name doesn't fit as its in need of new content, multiple times. The solution? I can skip "provider-name". The caveat though is that I lose out on ranking for provider keywords as I don't have a cornerstone content page for them. Question: Using the URL structure as outlined above in WordPress, would you A) go with "Pages", or B) use "Posts"
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Dan-Louis0 -
Updating 2013 Site Built with Custom Theme, Modify Existing Theme, Create New Custom Theme, Or Use Child Theme?
Our website was designed in 2013 using a custom theme. Some of the plugins are built from scratch. Ranking in our industry is hyper competitive. We are seeking a better interface and also to improve ranking. I have read that custom themes use lighter code and can rank better. Does this apply to a custom theme from 2013? Will we have an SEO advantage using a custom theme? If so, will that advantage be significant? We are using a discontinued plugin called "Firestorm" to display real estate listings. That plugin has been customized. Can we use that plugin on a new "custom" theme? How about on a "child" theme? In terms of the cost of future maintenance, will a "custom" theme require much more intervention (manual installation of updates) moving forward? Which of the following options is best: 1. Adapt our existing custom theme
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
2. Create a new custom theme
3. Create a child theme Thanks,
Alan0 -
SEO Strategy help
Hi, I run a B2B 3rd party retail ecommerce site and I am kind of stuck on how to implement my SEO strategy.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | steve45058
So I learned from AdWords data that the best converting words to my site is the (Brand name, Model Number). Many of my B2B customers already know what they want/are looking for. Now this is all fine and dandy for adwords, but I don't really know how to implement this strategy on the SEO side. I do rank decent for some of these product keywords, but 99% of them I do not (which confuses me because some of the brands I rank high for are the more popular brands eg. more competition.) When I do keyword research on SEMRush or another site, it tells me that the competition for this type of keyword strategy is extremely high. Any Help, Advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!1 -
International SEO Question
_The company I work for has a website www.example.com that ranks very well in English speaking countries - US, UK, CA. For legal reasons, we now need to create www.example.co.uk to be accessible and rank in google.co.uk. Obviously we want this change to be as smooth as possible with little effect on rankings in the UK. We have two options that we're talking through at the moment - Use the hreflang tag on both the .com and the .co.uk to tell Google which site to rank in each country. My worry with this is that we might lose our rankings in the UK as it will be a brand new site with little to no links pointing to it. 301 redirect to the .co.uk based on UK IP addresses. I'm skeptical about this. As a 301 passes most of the link juice, I'm not sure how Google would treat this type of thing - would the .com lose ranking? So my questions are - would we lose ranking in the UK if we use option 1? Would option 2 work? What would you do? Any help is appreciated._
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | awestwood0 -
How do retailers phase out short term promotional pages for best SEO?
I have a high level question and am open to all discussions. I work for a large ecommerce site and we are always making new landing pages, product assortments and promotions. We have a challenge on how to retire these pages after a promotion is outdated. What is this the MOZ community option on a way to retire, like 301 redirect to home page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mm9161570 -
SEO: Subdomain vs folders
Hello, here's our situation:We have an ecommerce website, say www.example.com. For support, we use zendesk which offers a great platform that makes publishing FAQ and various resource articles very easy. We're torn between publishing these articles on our actual website, or publishing them via Zendesk. If we publish them on our website, the url would be something like:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yacpro13
www.example.com/articles/title_article.html On the other hand, if we publish them via zendesk, the url would look like:
support.example.com/articles/title_of_article We would like to publish them via Zendesk, however, we do no want to miss out on any SEO benefit, however marginal it may be. Doing it this way, the domain would have all of the ecommerce pages (product and category pages), and the subdomain would have ALL other types of pages (help articles and also policies, such as return policies, shipping info, etc etc). I know a long time ago, folders were preferred over subdomains for SEO, but things change all the time.Do you think setting up all the ecommerce pages on the domain, and all content pages on the subdomain, would be a lesser solution? Thanks.0 -
What is your best one sentence definition for SEO?
I have recently come across several bloggers that have been trying to formulate the best concise definition of SEO. What one sentence definitions have you used / seen? Avoid run-ons. Tweetable, even better.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gyi0