Using Permalinks

I’ve been noticing that some beginner bloggers don’t take advantage of the permalink options that Wordpress gives you. Permalinks are the things that make the addresses of your articles look like mine do. They take out all the “.php” and ID numbers and such. These are a must if you are striving to have good optimization for search engines. It makes it easier for spiders to crawl and indexes the pages better. This in turn gives you a higher rank in search engines and more people will see it.

To use permalinks, go to your Wordpress admin, click the options tab and the Permalinks sub-tab. You can customize it any way that you want. I use /%postname%/. I thought that this would be the easiest for spiders to crawl and would provide the most optimization. I could be wrong. I don’t know. This will probably mess something up if I name two post exactly the same. But, that’s just a chance I’m going to have to take. Hopefully I can remember what I named my post.

I’ve listed all the avaliable structure tags below so that you can customize however you want:

  • %year% - the year of the post
  • %monthnumb% - the month, in number form
  • %day% - day of the month, in number form
  • %hour% - the hour it was posted
  • %minute% - the minute it was posted
  • %second% - the second it was posted
  • %postname% - the name of the post
  • %post_id% - the id of the post
  • %category% - the category the post was placed in
  • %author% - the person who wrote it

More information can be found at Wordpress’s official site.

11 Responses to “Using Permalinks”

  1. Katy Says:

    Useful information indeed!

    I just wrote a post about creating permalinks myself.

  2. will Says:

    Thanks :). I’m reading your post now.

  3. Kelly Says:

    Impressed with your site. Commented mostly to get your e-mails. Really only interested in how to improve my site.

  4. Will Harrison Says:

    Thanks for the compliment. I should let you know that by clicking the subscribe button in the comment box, you only get emails when somebody comments on the same post as you.

  5. Kelly Says:

    If you ever have time I would like to know how to set up my comments like this instead of the generic one that comes with wordpress.

    Also if you can tell me what and how to put your blog on my blogroll I would love to do it for you even though my traffic is almost nothing.

  6. Will Harrison Says:

    Expect a post either today or tomorrow about threaded comments :).

    To put me on your Blogroll, just log into Wordpress and click the Blogroll tab. Once there, you’ll have the open to add a link. Simply click that and type my site in. Thanks for adding me! :D

  7. Kelly Says:

    I put you in my blogroll, it won’t help you much with the little traffic I get but at least your site has one more link. :)

  8. Will Harrison Says:

    I appreciate it much :)

  9. Kelly Says:

    I’d still like to know if this comment box is a plugin or if there is some way that isn’t too difficult to change it. Mine is the one where you have to be registered and there isn’t an option to subscribe to comments.

  10. Will Harrison Says:

    It is a plugin called Brian’s Threaded comments. The default one never requires registration to post comments. You can change it to not need comment in the options -> general. Under General Options, you’ll find where it says Membership. You can disable the need to register.

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