Customize Your Permalinks

6. How To Customize Your Permalinks

Permalinks are permanent URLs to your individual weblog posts, categories and other lists of weblog postings. A permalink should be a link that does not change in its appearance because other bloggers may link to your post or your article.

The default links that come with your Word Press theme will end in something like this:


/index.php?p=423


This kind of link is not easily spidered by the search engines therefore you will lose precious search engine traffic. You therefore need to customize your permalinks. Here is one of my articles which shows the keyword-rich title I used:

http://www.drostdesigns.com/blog-seo-how-to-optimize-your-blog-for-the-search-engines/

How to create a customized permalink

1) In the Control Panel, go to Options > Permalinks.
2) Choose the radio button for ‘custom’ and enter /%postname%/
3) Click “Update Permalink Structure”

At this point, WordPress will tell you the exact code that you should place in your .htaccess file that you will want to upload if
you don’t already have one. If you do already have an .htaccess file in the directory, if you chmod it (WordPress suggests 666) so that it is writable, wordpress will actually insert the code for you.

Explanation

I chose the structure of /%postname%/ over the one that has the dates in it because it’s better for the search engines
(don’t have to go as many levels deep) and because it’s more likely someone who comes across your link after doing a search on google, say, will click it than if it was date based b/c you could have an article that was updated as recently as yesterday, but if the permalink is of the form /2004/08/03/postname/ because if that’s when you originally made the post then people might think the article is outdated (and wouldn’t have any way of knowing from the search engine listing that your article had been updated yesterday).

Resources

If you need to change .htaccess manually for some reason, and for a complete discussion, go to
Using Permalinks.

If you want to know how to code rewrite rules in .htaccess, go to URL Rewriting.

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