Using permalinks to make your posts SEO friendly
Have you ever looked at your Wordpress URL and wondered, “who came up with that?” I would like to introduce you to Permalinks. Wordpress permalinks give you the flexibility to have a clear, easy to read, consistent look and feel to your URL’s.
The default permalink settings for Wordpress is “domain.com/?p=123“, who wants that? How would you like to try to explain that URL to someone. It’s definately not Search Engine friendly.
I’m one of those people that doesn’t read the owners manual for something new. I typically fumble around pushing buttons to figure out what it can do. It’s usually only when I get stuck that I resort to the owners manual.
Well, with permalinks I had to break out the manual. There are 4 default settings available from Wordpress on the admin page: Default (example above), Day and Name, Month and Name, or Numeric. I didn’t want any of these choices and found out that there really aren’t a lot of options, but I found one that I liked better than the default offerings. If you don’t like the default 4 that are offered you can choose the custom structure and put any combination of the 10 variables available. I’m currently using /%category%/%postname%/.
Below are the 10 variables from Wordpress:
%year%
The year of the post, four digits, for example 2004
%monthnum%
Month of the year, for example 05
%day%
Day of the month, for example 28
%hour%
Hour of the day, for example 15
%minute%
Minute of the hour, for example 43
%second%
Second of the minute, for example 33
%postname%
A sanitized version of the title of the post (post slug field on Edit Post/Page panel). So “This Is A Great Post!” becomes this-is-a-great-post in the URI (see Using only %postname%)
%post_id%
The unique ID # of the post, for example 423
%category%
A sanitized version of the category name (category slug field on New/Edit Category panel). Nested sub-categories appear as nested directories in the URI.
%author%
A sanitized version of the author name.
Filed Under: Wordpress
