Choosing joy daily in my life full of topknot buns, baby kisses, and flour on the floor. I wouldn’t have it any other way! Oh, and I photograph the SWEETEST people!
Get 50% off Honeybook with this link!
Mama, taking photos of your littles can be tough, so let’s make editing EASY! Create frame-worthy photos in one tap with our Cotton Mobile Presets!
And why do I care, as a photographer and not an internet wizard? We’ll go over why search engines love user-friendly hyperlinks and how simplifying your structure will boost your content. Ranking higher in Google and other search engines will only bring more clients and opportunity your way!
Upon default, a new WordPress blog will create links for your blog posts similar to https://thecottoncollective.com/2018/06/15/3-things-to-do-when-creating-your-wordpress-blog. While this isn’t the absolute worst, there’s definitely room for improvement.
This is a big grumpy pet peeve of mine! Mostly because it’s such a simple fix if you choose right in the beginning and such a pain when you decide to change it later. Often I’ll see very established bloggers with this little “mistake”. I call it a mistake since it can hurt your SEO score, and every little bit counts when you’re trying to rank for your content. Frustratingly, it’s not necessarily a mistake you can easily fix down the line. For optimal SEO, I’d recommend customizing each blog post URL with your relevant SEO keywords. However, if you’re feeling lazy, this 30-second fix will save you work down the line!
Here’s how to set up your permalink structure, it’s the easiest thing ever!
Okay, cool, so why is this important?
At the very least, this change will shorten your hyperlinks by 10 characters, and shorter URLs are winning for a few reasons. Mainly, those reasons are readability and ease of sharing. Search engines reward your content for its readability. By that, I mean readability as your grandma reads and understands and not as a computer reads! The more clearly your blog post content comes across in your link, the more likely someone is to trust and click on it.
Don’t take the length of your URL to extremes, 50-60 characters is great! As long as you maintain a balance between URL length and readability, you’ll be good!
Once you change the format of your hyperlinks, it changes all of your past links as well. Internal links (linking to one of your blog posts from another) can break and external links (anytime a link to your website lives outside of your site, on email, social media, etc) will start sending visitors to a 404 page rather than to the content they’re looking for. Also, search engines will remove the pages whose permalinks have changed from their index. Yikes! No one wants to start on SEO ground zero!
If you’re already deep in a hyperlink nightmare, here is a really helpful guide for making the switch!
An easy-to-digest guide for the best SEO practices for structuring URLs
Creating a WordPress blog from scratch and don’t know where to start? Here. Here is where you start.
Hopefully, you’ve got a much better idea of how to change your hyperlink structure improve SEO and are making the switch right now! I know you can do it, internet wizard or not! We’re always cheering you on!
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Choosing joy daily in my life full of topknot buns, baby kisses, and flour on the floor. I wouldn’t have it any other way! Oh, and I photograph the SWEETEST people!
Get 50% off Honeybook with this link!
Mama, taking photos of your littles can be tough, so let’s make editing EASY! Create frame-worthy photos in one tap with our Cotton Mobile Presets!
Houston Newborn Photographer
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