How To Customize Your Permalink Structure
Making a decision about your blog link structure is in the top 5 things you should do before publishing your first blog post. Your link structure is what you see in your browser address bar when you’re looking at a website, blog or blog post page and it’s one of the most important parts of getting traffic to your post.
One of the best ways to rank higher for your keyword phrase is to have them in your domain name. A blog that is about photography would rank higher and come up in more searches if the domain name was something like www.herviewphotography.com rather than www.herview.ca for example. “Her View” is catchy yes, and of course good branding, but for organic search engine traffic from people looking for fine art photography, www.herview.ca would have to rely on a lot of “on page” optimization.
Having the keyword phrase in the actual url of the website page or blog post is a very important and often overlooked aspect of blog design.
In the example below, you see the URL of another post in this blog
Here you see the domain name Blog Building Basics, followed by the category name of the post in question, “blogging tips” and then the actual post title. The post title is followed by .html which indicates that it is to be viewed in a web browser.
This format is but one way set up your permalink structure and is why I wrote earlier about the importance of a good post title. Aaron Wall, the author of SEOBook, describes how to create search engine friendly page titles in his free search engine optimization video I recently posted and this is where it all applies, the custom permalink structure.
What Is A Permalink?
Permalink stands for Permanant Link and is used to describe the full link to the blog post or website page.
When you first go to a blog, you might see a couple of posts on the front page but each post has it’s own page all by itself as well. The link to that single post is called the Permanant Link or Permalink.
Choosing A Custom Permalink Structure
A Wordpress blog handles all this through the Custom Permalink Structure setup on the Permalink sub tab of the Wordpress Options Tab.
When you first create a blog with Wordpress, the default setting is chosen. You see in the screen shot that the default setting uses the post id number rather than the title.
Ugly Permalinks
If your post is about “Fine Art Photography From Peru” and your post number is 24, the link to your post would be www.herviewphotography.com/?p=24 . As described above, www.herviewphotography.com/fine-art/fine-art-photography-from-peru.html would be much more descriptive and get your keyword phrases in the url.
Using the post id number as your url descriptor is called “ugly permalink”
The Date and Name based setting inserts the year, the month and the day, then the post name without the .html but instead a trailing slash. Much better than the default and used for very busy blogs, ones with many posts and when post titles might duplicate.
If you use the custom one like I suggest, you’d have to do well not to duplicate a post title as your blog ages because Wordpress would gag on it, not knowing which post to show “fine art photography” from March 21st 2004 or “fine art photography” from Dec 22nd, 2006. Same title, two different posts, …hiccup… crash.
Pretty Permalinks
If you think your page titles are going to be unique all the time, with no duplication, the best choice for a new blogger in my opinion is to use the custom setting and then specify the custom structure. These url’s that use the full post title instead of numeric descriptor are called “pretty permalinks”
Insert your custom structure into the field provided. In my example, I used two Wordpress Permalink variables %category% and %postname% with the slashes to separate them and followed with “.html” to complete it.
If you use a lot of the same post titles but want to create some sort of uniqueness, I would opt for one of these two custom structures
/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%.html
Or
/%category%/%post_id%/%postname%.html
This last option gives you a keyword phrase from the category, inserts the post id to make it unique, then finishes with the post title and then .html
What you’re looking at in the example above are variables that Wordpress uses. A percent sign is wrapped around a word and is then used internally to pull the data from the database based on the variable. The variable %category% is replaced with the actual category. In the case of two categories being used, Wordpress uses the one with the lower id number.
Look here for a complete list of permalink structure tags, and more information about this as not all combinations of structure tags work together.
It’s important if not critical to get this done right before you even write your first post because if you’ve got any inbound links to your blog or blog pages and then change your permalink structure, all those links will now be dead (404 not found). When you first create a blog, choosing a custom permalink structure should be on the top of your list. Besides, it’s easy, the entire Options tab setup takes about 5 minutes or less.
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