Now that’s we’ve covered how great WordPress is as a general SEO CMS on the first page of this WordPress SEO tutorial let’s take a look at how WordPress should be setup to run as a SEO CMS or to make a general WordPress blog do better in the search engines (especially Google).
If your new to WordPress out the box your new WordPress URL’s will be along the lines of:
www.domain.com/?p=1
This is called a dynamic URL and contains variables (?p=1 is a variable), when Google was first created their search engine algorithm couldn’t read URL’s like this, in layman terms you were pretty much stuck with URL’s lacking variables (meaning no question marks ?) simple URL’s like www.domain.com/page1.html. Today Google and all other major search engines have no problem at all with dynamic URL’s like this and so your site will be fully spidered/indexed by Google etc… However, there is a MUCH better way to present your URL’s for better search engine rankings and that is the SEO friendly WordPress permalinks that can look like this:
www.domain.com/awesome-site-on-keyword.html
www.domain.com/awesome-site-on-keyword
www.domain.com/awesome-site-on-keyword.php
or many other ways to present your content.
www.domain.com/awesome-site-on-keyword
www.domain.com/awesome-site-on-keyword.php
or many other ways to present your content.
I usually use the top version because Google spiders pages ending in html faster than those ending in php (Google assumes a page ending in php might be dynamic and slows spidering) and I like to see end content pages ending in .html and archive pages like your Category archive to lack .html (just my preference, any of the above are good SEO wise).
