There are many little things I do when I first install a fresh copy of WordPress on a site. One of those is the permalink structure. Permalinks are the address structure of your blog posts. For example this blogs permalinks are structured withmedia.ca/category/postname.
What you first install WordPress it uses a a structure that is not friendly for SEO or humans. That being said there are many different structures that you can use that will better your odds for people remembering links and Google indexing the post. WordPress offers two other variations and a custom option.
How To
Changing the structure is easy to do and for that reason alone I recommend doing it. When you are in your dashboard click on the settings tab, which will expand the tab and show you the rest of the options under setting. Click on permalinks, which should be the 7th one down. On the permalinks page you will see the different options you have to choose from. So lets look at those options.
Dashboard > Settings > Permalinks
Preset Structures
You do not want to stay on the default, that is why I’m writing this post in the first place. The next two options include the date, the first is the full date and the post name – /%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/. The second is only the year and month – /%year%/%monthnum%/. For a long time people told me these were the better options, but recently Matt Cutts of Google said in a video that the doesn’t actually affect how that page ranks on Google. The date is already a part of the post, so the title is what you should focus on. So do I use one of these options, yes. I find having the date in the post gives me a quick place to look to see if the post I am reading is recent and relevent.
Custom Structures
The customs structure option gives you the ability to create any structure you want. The structure I use for this site is /%category%/%postname%/. This structure displays the category and post name. I use this structure because in my opinion it helps categorize my posts. Below are some of the structure tags you can use, which are self-explanatory:
- %year%
- %monthnum%
- %day%
- %hour%
- %minute%
- %second%
- %category%
- %postname%
Time to Decide
At the end of the day it is all up to you. Like I said above, I strongly recommend you change the structure from default, but after than it is on you. Do you add the date or add in the category or both. How do you want your readers to see it. What is best for your kind of website. For more information about WordPress Permalinks check out their Codex.
Once you figure out which structure you like, let us know in the comments. If you don’t agree with me, let me know what you’d do differently.
