2.2 Why Optimize Your Permalinks?

Hello, and welcome back to this Tuts+ course on WordPress Permalinks. In this part of the course, I'm gonna show you why it's important to optimize your permalinks both for search engine optimization and for user experience. So optimizing your permalinks for SEO will help search engines to understand better what's in your posts. So if we take a look at this post here, we've got social media time suck when you should be working or invaluable tool for marketing because WordPress is automatically generated a slug based on our title. Now, that's got some SEO benefits. It's got social media and it's got marketing, but it might be possible to optimize it, and we'll do that during the course. But the reason that it's good to have words that are meaningful and that people are likely to search for in your slugs is that it adds to the metadata that Google and other search engines have about your post so that they can better understand what the content of that post is, and therefore put you higher in the search engine rankings. So if we have a look at this example from my other site, advanced WordPress for professionals, that's really good for SEO because we've got advanced WordPress and we've got professionals. And that's the kind of thing somebody might search for if they're looking for some advanced WordPress content. I've also included my category names in here. I've got ultimate, I've got essentials and basics and applications. And I've chosen to include those because particularly when it comes to essentials and applications, people might be searching for those. So this article by Yoast explains what permalinks are and how they benefit your SEO. And the main thing is to ensure that you use permalinks that include real words, and not numbers and symbols and that kind of thing. And also include the keywords that you want to optimize your posts for, so that they get better search engine rankings. So here is an example. I've googled slugs and UX, because I want to know about user experience for slugs. And here I've got this post from Tuts+, what is a slug in WordPress? When I go to that, I can see that it's about slugs and the word slug is in the title. Now, it already ranks very highly when I google slugs in UX, because of the fact that there's an H2 element in here called slugs and UX. So that gives Google a really, really strong signal that slugs and UX is an important topic in this post. But I can boost it even more maybe by calling this what is a slug, or slugs SEO UX WordPress. Which might be a little bit too much in terms of keyword stuffing, but it would certainly tell Google what the topics are of this particular post. So as SEO, you also need to optimize your slugs and your permalinks for user experience. And in this article here, Jacob Nielsen, who is an expert on user experience on websites, discusses why URLs are particularly important for user experience. And you can see that his URL up here has a very short slug at the end URL as UI. Now that is optimized for SEO because we've got a URL and UI, but it's also optimized for user experience because it's short, and it's clear. If I wanted to share this article with you I could read out that the URL for that article and tell it to you in full and you could hopefully remember it, though it is a little bit long with articles in here. But again, that helps search engines and people know that this is an article. So having URLs that are short and that are meaningful and they're easy to remember, are particularly good for user experience. Because that means that people can tell them to each other, members of your team can tell potential clients for example. So if you have a services page on your website, calling it mind domain not.com/services, will be incredibly easy to remember and to tell people. So those are the two forms of optimization that you need to do for your permalinks and your slugs in WordPress. In the next part of the course, I'll show you how to optimize permalink settings in WordPress, so that they're better for SEO and user experience. See you next time and thanks for watching.