1. Increase Twitter Followers to 500 (241 remain) 2. Post Regularly to Gifts4Men 3. Develop three blogs/websites with passive income streams 4. Save for Own Home 5.Improve my Fitness Levels (1lbs lost) 6. Watch 150+ Films (13/150)
One of the key components of WordPress is the permalink structure. This defines how the URL to each of your posts will look in the browser window. By default, WordPress adds something akin to ‘?id=12’ to the end of your main blog URL to indicate that you wish to show the post with the ID of #12. This doesn’t look pretty and doesn’t aid your search engine optimisation (SEO) at all.
Within your WordPress settings in your administration panel, you are able to modify the permalink structure to better suit them to your blog. A series of options are given to you that contain pre-built structures for you to use. Personally, I ignore each and every one of these and opt to create my own custom structure.
The custom structure I use most often can be seen in the image above.
/%postname%
By using this permalink structure, you add the title of your post directly to the URL. Any spaces in the posts title are replaced with hyphens and you are aiding your SEO efforts by adding these keywords to your URL. Other bloggers use this exact same structure (Tyler Cruz, John Chow and Daniel Harrison) though they all append an extra forward-slash to the end to make it read
/%postname%/
I personally don’t feel that it makes a difference adding this forward-slash in there or not, but if you were to visit a URL on this blog with that structure the slash is automatically removed from the address.
Other items that can be added to your structure to consider have been listed below. Other than adding your category before your post title, I cannot see any of these adding any extra benefit to either your users or your standings in the search engines.
%year%
%monthnum%
%day%
%hour%
%minute%
%second%
%postname%
%post_id%
%category%
%author%
If you have any preferences over your permalink structure, let me know. I’d be interested in hearing people’s reasoning behind using structures other than those I have already mentioned.
That’s a smart idea. Any keywords in the URL are a good idea. I don’t think there’s such a preference on order compared to title tags, but I bet there is some benefit.
I also use the that structure. But, I add .php or .html, like this
/%postname%.php/ or /%postname%.html/
Some people say “that is more search engine friendly”
