html Wordpress

html extension Wordpress SEO

No on the Internet knows if html extensions in Wordpress are better for search engine optimization.  People just repeat what other people say with conviction, but they are not basing it on fact.  My personal experience has been my .html pages rank higher than my normal Wordpress pages.  This could  for many reasons.  So I can not say 100% that .html Wordpress pages rank higher or are better for SEO.

The theory is static pages like .html extensions are less easy to manipulate than dynamic pages.  Therefore, static pages might have a slight advantage with search engines.  However, this is in no way confirmed.  My .html pages could have ranked better as they are seen as one off pages and a little more unique then the rest of my site or as one off pages more page rank could have flowed to them based on my internal linking structure.

Further to truly make your page seem .html to SERPs you need to change a few more things I suspect than just change the extension. Therefore, I use html extensions on my Wordpress blog for the look rather than SEO.

.html Wordpress look

Another reason why you might want to add .html to your Wordpress blog is people say it looks better.  It feels and looks static and some people view this subconsciously with a little more trust then a dynamic page.

However, some people like the cleaner trailing slash look of a normal url without any extensions.  I personally do not like .php or .asp at the end of sites.  For me they look and feel spammy so I often avoid them.

Changing your .html site to wordpress

Another reason why you perhaps want to use .html extensions on your Wordpress permalink structure is, you had a static html site you want to convert to Wordpress but do not want to change the url names.  This is another reason to make Wordpress html extensions in terms of permalink structure, if you do not want to do a lot of 301 redirects.  I am pretty lazy.

Issues in Wordpress .html

There are some basic permalink issues connected to having your Wordpress blog ending in .html.

• If you change to .html then make sure you use a redirection plugin.
• There is a trailing slash issue
• There is a hierarchical category issue (Use a ‘top level category plugin’ to fix this)

All these problems of having an html extension wordpress site. I have detailed this in my  html-with-no-trailing-slash post. Also read my navigation-structure-wordpress-seo post for a greater understanding of SEO and wordpress and your permalink structure.

html extension Wordpress permalink structure

html extension Wordpress

I use: /%category%/%postname%.html

Some people prefer a flat structure /%postname%.html but for Wordpress SEO a hierarchical structure is better as you have more keywords or at least synonyms in the url.  Consider LSI or latent semantic content concepts when choosing your categories.

html Wordpress without a less optimal SEO structure

The truth is quality content is much better than playing around with your permalinks.  If you notice I do not have .html on this site.

However, I like to test things and play and I have been experimenting with an html extension for Wordpress.  I have got good results.  I thought I would offer it as an idea if someone wants to test it.

I do not know if it was because users subconsciously preferred a site with .html at the end or search engines gave it a slight preference.  It might be pure coincidence and hence magical thinking that html Wordpress is better SEO-ed. The bottom line is I like to check things for myself rather than recycle what others say with conviction.  Objectivity is the essence of intelligence. Let me know what you think about the idea of  html Wordpress extensions and SEO.

Tags: html, Wordpress