Get Blog Title in URL for SEO Friendly Posts

If your blog post URLs look something like ?p=12 instead of a user friendly url, this article goes over how to get your URLs optimized for both search engines and users.

Including relevant keywords in the URL can help search engines understand the content of the page and improve the chances of it being displayed for relevant searches, however it needs to make sense and not just be a long list of keywords stuffed together. SEO-friendly URLs are typically concise, descriptive, and easy to read. 

People like to have an idea of what type of information a web page might contain by looking at the URL. By having your page or blog post title in the URL, it gives them more of a trust factor. Not to mention it can help get your website ranked higher in terms of organic search on search engines like Google. This is a very important piece of SEO so make sure you make this change.

How to Get Blog Title in URL

To get blog title in the URL, there’s a setting in WordPress under:

Settings > Permalinks > Common Settings > Post Name

This will create much more SEO and user friendly blog post URLs.

Make sure to include important long tailed keywords in your post names! You can also use Wordstream’s Free Keyword Tool to help you determine which long tailed keywords to go after.

301 Redirects When Changing URLs

If you change any of your URLs after your page or post has gone live, you want to make sure you set up a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new. That way if anyone has your old page bookmarked or has an article that links to your website, it will go to your new page instead of a 404 page. A 301 redirect is the proper type of redirect to use for SEO purposes because it tells search engines to pass on the link juice or ranking power to your new page.

When other websites link to you, you typically gain more link juice or ranking power, which is important for SEO. Be careful though, you may lose some of the ranking power when you do a redirect; a 301 redirect is thought to pass between 90-99% of link juice. In most cases 301 redirects is the best method to use when you need to set up a redirect.