SEO Friendly URL’s For Chinese In WordPress

When using WordPress for special character websites such as Chinese, you have to be careful to manually specify the Permalinks. If you use Chinese characters for the title of a page or a post, then the Permalink that is automatically generated by WordPress will be come out in a strange format and won’t work correctly.The trick for Chinese web pages is to use pinyin to write out the Permalinks. For example a page that is titled ‘关于我们’ (About Us), the best way to write out the Permalink is to use ‘guanyuwomen’.

The main reason for this is that Baidu, China’s most popular search engine with a market share of more than 62 percent, is able to recognise the pinyin words in the URL and then link them to what they stand for in Chinese characters.

It is also worth remember to leave out any hyphenation, and just write the words out in a long string. Otherwise it may interfere with the search engines ability to connect the words meaning together.

Within WordPress there are two places to make the change to a permalink. Firstly on the posts or pages listing page, you can click on ‘Quickedit’ and then edit the ‘Slug’. Alternatively you can edit the post or page, and just below the title input box there is an editable Permalink.

The second option is only available if you have already turned on Permalinks, if you find you cannot edit it, then click on the button ‘Permalink’ that appears beside the URL and update your Permalink Settings (also located under Settings > Permalinks).

Finally, for the Permalink settings I always choose the 3rd setting ‘Month and name’ if I am doing a blog and if it is a website I use the custom setting and enter ‘/%category%/%postname%/’.

Hopefully these tips will help with your WordPress based Chinese langage websites.