A quick word about WordPress permalinks

Posted by Mike

Here’s a thing. The default installation of WordPress I’ve just done is set up in such a way that the URL of each individual post is what they call ‘ugly’ – it contains numbers and question marks, rather than containing the actual text from the title of your post. And apart from being ‘ugly’, these links are not particularly Search Engine friendly.

To fix this, I had to go to Settings and Permalinks to choose a new format for the post URL – there are a few ready-made formats to click and choose from – I decided to use the form

www.mikeafford.com/blog/$year/$month/$title_of_post

For this to work, I needed to add a .htaccess file to the main blog directory – rather strange that it wasn’t included in the installation. Anyway, with that in place, the new permalinks appeared immediately.

1 Comment

  • Leon Quinn says:

    Mike, the blog is lookin fab, you seem to have gained a good grip of wordpress pretty fast. Heres my permalink structure, just paste /%postname%/ in the Custom Structure field and you'll get nice tidy and short SEO url's. I've never seen the need for the year and month variables.

    Also, if you want to optimize the url's further you can edit the permalink of each individual page or post by clicking 'edit' on the permalink, just under the page/post title. Put in as many keywords as you like!

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