WordPress Hierarchical Permalinks

Pretty Permalinks help search engines better understand your site. You probably know that you should put your targeted keywords in your URLs.

I don’t think permalinks are important because they allow you to do that. Your <title> tag probably overrides URL keywords.

But permalinks are important because without them you cannot create URL hierarchy or “breadcrumb URL.” URL hierarchy illustrates the structure of your site to search engines. That’s why they are important.

As a first step for creating URL hierarchy in WordPress, enable permalinks. Choose /%postname%/ for your Custom Structure.

Next, install the Custom Permalinks plugin. It allows you to give your posts hierarchical URLs — like:

WordPress doesn’t know or care about your post URL hierarchies, so you have to keep track of your URLs yourself.

Customize Category Pages and Their URLs

You don’t want a category page that’s simply a chronological list of posts if you’re using WordPress as a CMS. With the help of Custom Permalinks plugin, you can write the content for each category page. Here’s how:

Create a WordPress category the usual way. In your “Add New Category” page, you’ll see a “Custom Permalink” field. Give your category any custom permalink, say, http://example.com/parent-page/. Now add a new post and give it the same permalink.

When a visitor accesses a category page that you’ve setup in this way, he’ll land on the post that you wrote for this category page instead. If you unpublished or deleted the post, the normal WordPress category page will be served.

Caution: For performance reasons, I would only recommend that you setup your permalink structure in this way if you will install a caching plugin.

Check out these links for more WordPress optimization tips:

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