21st Customize Your Permalinks
I should have written this step earlier as this is the first thing that all bloggers need to do when starting a new blog. Customize your permalink structure before you start posting.
As you can see from the picture above, there are several options that you can select if you?re using Wordpress. You can even customize your own permalink structure. A lot of people choose to customize their permalink as below:
Domain + Category + Post Name
That gives you:
http://www.yourdomain.com/category/PostName
Code in the custome structure box:
/index.php/%category%/%postname%
The most important part is to make sure that you insert the post name instead of just numbers. There are couples of reasons for this and the first reason is SEO friendly. Search engines can pick up the links quicker if there is a post name on the links. Second reason is that people will know immediately what this link is about by just pointing at it. People will more likely to click on it if they know where the links lead to.
If you?re changing your permalink structure after several postings, you need to redirect your old links to the new ones. You need to install Permalink Redirect Plugin so that you won?t lose all your incoming links.
Another thing that you need to remember is that if your post name is too long, you can always shorten it using the relevant post slug. For example if your post name is:
This is my very very very very very very long post
You can shorten it with the sentence below:
My-long-post
Just insert it into the post slug box. Long permalinks will get chop off when posting in comments and emails. Thus the links will lead to a page not found.
P/S: I?m still using the date and name based structure permalinks at this moment. That is the best structure that I can think of when started this blog. After this post, I?ll change it to Domain + Category + Post Name structure.
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Comments
I just feel that date might not be that important because most of the time we search base on keywords in stead of time. Well, as long as it brings lots of traffic then it’s fine with me.
The default WordPress permalinks is horrific in terms of SEO and even organization in general. I prefer a custom one that includes the title of the post.
That’s true. I didn’t get it right at the beginning. After couple of mistakes here and there then finally got it right.
I think the structure depends on the type of blog , If your blogging about everyday things thats happening around you date and name based structure is the best.