While it may not have a huge impact on your overall search engine ranking, SEO-friendly links are still important. Whether your links are nice and polished like, “http://domainname.com/page-name” or dynamically generated like, “http://domainmae.com/?p=8675309”, search engines and users will be able to read through the page. The benefit, however, of friendly SEO links is that they can be crafted to contain keywords of the given page.
If you have multiple words in mind to use in your SEO friendly links, separate them with a hyphen (-). If the words are hyphen separated, search engines will view each word individuall. If everything is all together, searching engines will only view them “asoneword.”
In WordPress, this is all very easy to do. Toward the top of the page, just under the field for the page name, there is a link named, “Permalink.” The SEO-friendly part of the link is what comes after the domain name (www.domainname.com/). Just to the right of that is an edit button. Once you click on the Edit button, the last section of the Permalink will become editable and you can change it to any keyword needed for that page.
As with any SEO technique, the goal should always be to help make your site more enjoyable for users as opposed to getting a better SEO ranking. If a user looks at a URL such as http://domainname.com/page-name, they are going to have a much better idea of what that page is going to be about than if it was listed as http://domainmae.com/?p=8675309. This can help users choose to click on your link when they see it in search results.
While they may not have the biggest impact on search engine ranking, optimizing your site to have SEO-friendly links is an important objective that shouldn’t be overlooked. They are a simple and effective way to make your site more user-friendly.
