SEO Friendly Permalink Structure

A Permalink is a URL to your Forum thread, Blog post or Product page. Permalink may be referred as permanent link. Permalinks play a major role when it comes to SEO of your website. If you are not using Breadcrumbs your permalink is the green text which is shown below your title on search engine result pages.

How Permalinks are displayed in Google search

Most of the content management systems allow users to change the format of permalinks, Below we will discuss about search engine friendly permalinks for different type of websites.
We will also focus on user friendly structure of URL so users can get a idea about landing page.

SEO Friendly Permalink Structure For Blogs

A blog contains many posts, some categories and tags, some archive pages and a index page.

We should use different kind of permalinks so it will be both user and search engine friendly.

Permalink Structure For Blog Post

Every blog post contains a date,categories and tags. if you are using blogger, you can not change the permalink structure it will always be example.com/YYYY/MM/Post-title.html, but if you are using wordpress or any other blogging platforms you can easily change them.

A both user and SEO friendly URl would be something like:

if you have a blog about cooking and posting a  recipe about banana, the url should look like http://example.com/recipes/special-banana-ice-cream

this will give a idea to users that the post is about the Banana Ice-Cream recipe.

so using that a permalink structure for all the posts should be -

http://example.com/category/post-name

URL Structure for Categories,Tags and Archive pages

When we talk about permalinks for category page you can either choose it as http://example.com/category/catehory-name or you may use the url without mentioning the term "category" in url like http://example.com/category-name

for tag pages you must use any term like tag or topic and use a permalink like /tag/tag-name

for archive pages you can use /archive/2014/may (as this gives a clear idea that user is going to 2014 may month's archive).

Search Engine Friendly Permalink Structure For Forums

Forums are online communities where users share ideas, ask questions and answer them on threads. a good permalink for a forum thread can be /topic/ID/topic-name or if forum is based on questions you can also use /question/ID/question-title

, where ID is a numerical ID assigned to every thread.

for users pages a good permalink would be something like /user/user-id

For Other Types of Website

If you have an E-Commerce or E-Shopping website where you sell products of different vendors a good seo friendly structure would be /product-type/brand

For e.g. you are selling T-shirts of XYZ brand you can use /t-shirts/xyz and if you want to separate men and women you can use /t-shirts/xyz/men

For sports websites that provide live scores they can use permalinks like /tournament-name/match-number/match-name.

like if you are providing scores of EPL match between Man. united and Arsenal the url should be /EPL-2014/12/Manchester-vs-Arsenal.

Using match number will ensure that if there are two matches between same teams permalinks won't be same.

Got something to think about, right?

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