WordPress URL Optimization

A clean URL structure helps your users and search engines find their way around your site faster. Error prevention and encryption are also important. You manage both with our SEO plugin.

Permalinks

A URL – also called permalink in WordPress – contains everything you see in the address bar of your website: e.g.

https://delucks.com/wordpress-seo-plugin/urls/

In your URLs, you can include relevant keywords so that users and search engines can find out more quickly what your respective page contains. In WordPress, URLs are always automatically titled with your content. However, since SEO-technically unnecessary filler words sometimes appear in this, it is recommended that they be filtered out automatically. This is done by our SEO plugin for you.

Hierarchy

For your entire WordPress project, make sure that all pages, blog posts, and other content types are stored in a unique, logical hierarchy. This greatly facilitates the operation of the site and thus also your SEO success.

In Google’s mobile search URLs are increasingly no longer displayed. To run mobile SEO, you activate our breadcrumb module.

404 Errors

In addition, you can define error pages via our SEO plugin. Because biggest risk factor of website changes and reloads are URL changes. If you forget to forward your links and search engines and users thus come on dead links (so-called 404 pages), then penalized Google with a devaluation of rankings and often with larger crawl intervals.

Although we need 404 pages to keep users on the site despite a dead link, if dead links arise, the search engine will be less frequent on your site and ranking improvements will take longer.

We recommend that you change as few links as possible at a later time and regularly check the errors in the Google Search Console and forward internal links to minimize these risks. If you have any 404 error (which you can find in the Google Search Console), please use the plugin Eggplant 301 Redirects to fix all dead links. If you have many dead links mentioned in the Google Search Console, you can export them to Excel and convert them into the EPS Redirects CSV format for mass redirection.

Settings

1. If you activate the function to remove stop words from your URLs, our SEO plugin changes your new permalinks based on the lists below (available in English, German, French and Spanish – individually changeable). Existing permalinks are not changed to avoid dead links.
2. Then select a default error page to which users will be redirected when they visit a dead link (404). You can choose here, if you put the error page on one of your WordPress content, or if your theme has already integrated an error page, redirect to this or disable the redirection of our plugin. The default error page will ideally be provided with a search and an apology, so that users do not jump off your website in an annoyed manner. What an error or 404 page should look like, we have explained here.
3. After the introduction of the GDPR in the middle of 2018, SSL encryption is mandatory for all pages containing forms which can be accessed via the EU. This does not only apply to contact forms, but also to the checkout in online shops, comment forms and newsletter forms. All in all, we would encrypt each page. After setting up an SSL certificate for your domain in your web hosting, you can change the spelling of your URL from http to https under the heading General in the WordPress settings. Since this is still often bypassed by hackers, you can use the option “Show secured connection” to enforce the encryption and make your site more secure. Important: Please resubmit the page after encryption in the Google Search Console and also change the URL settings in Google Analytics under administration / property settings to https.

After encryption

Whether all SSL settings are really safe, you can test with this tool.

Afterwards please first change all important business entries. Most important is Google My Business. After that, the links that you use to attract the most visitors are important. These can be found in Google Analytics under Acquisition> References.