Andrew Hyde lives in Boulder, Colorado and travels frequently.

Simple Permalink Trick

So many wordpress bloggers don’t do and it kinda drives me nuts.

When you link to one of your posts, what does it look like?

This?
bad url

Or this?
good url

It helps your SEO and really would make me happy if everyone did this simple trick:

Login to your blog.
Click Options -> Permalink
Change the radio button from default (are you really default) to “Custom, specify below”
and then fill in the Custom Structure box with “/%postname%/”

picture-2.png

This way all your urls will read yoursite.com/title-of-the-post instead of yoursite.com/?232. It helps with SEO among other things (for instance when you send a link to a friend and he writes a blog post about your link structure instead of just reading your post).

So much better.

Thanks.

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Andrew Hyde

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Comments

12 responses to “Simple Permalink Trick”

  1. sacker Avatar
    sacker

    Any reason not to use the second option, ‘Date and name based’? Does this hurt SEO in any way? I appreciate being able to put a post into context by having the date embedded in the URL as well.

  2. Andrew Avatar
    Andrew

    @sacker yes, the date is a good option as well, for me it is not the most useful thing.

  3. Friendly Intelligence – December 15, 2007

    […] s post on the launch of his latest venture simply so I could say “wind the frog!”)Simple Permalink Trick – Andrew posts a simple trick to improve your blog’s SEO. I jokingly now refer to him as Mr. […]

  4. Kevin Menzie Avatar
    Kevin Menzie

    That was too simple. Thanks for the tip! I’ve been wondering about that.

  5. Andrew Hyde » Blog Archive » Biggest Blogging Mistakes of 07

    […] Pet peeve of mine, really simple to fix. […]

  6. Chris Pratt Avatar
    Chris Pratt

    Personally, I like to see the date and name based structure. I helps when I’m scrolling through search results in Google and want to get information that’s up to date.

    Older posts can make good reference material, but I’ve been burned more than once following something from an article I later find out was dated.

    Just an extra nicety for the end-user, but either way works just so long as there’s no ugly question mark in the url.

  7. Andrew Avatar
    Andrew

    @Chris yes, the date can be very helpful

    I wonder if it helps or hurts you? Does it cloud the URL or does it provide relevant data? Would a google search of 2008 simple permalink trick not work for my current structure, but work really well with yours?

  8. My Domains » Blog Archive » Biggest Blogging Mistakes of 07

    […] Pet peeve of mine, really simple to fix. […]

  9. Kevin Menzie Avatar
    Kevin Menzie

    Just noticed that just using /%postname%/ actually breaks the WordPress in_category() function. However, if I use their pre-set date-based structure, it works fine.

  10. Tara Anderson Avatar
    Tara Anderson

    Andrew, I just started my personal blog and am learning about WordPress through a lot of trial and error. After publishing my second post, I saw the ugly permalink (?p=6) and immediately remembered this post you wrote. You helped me out and in the process, I learned how to rewrite some .htaccess files. While I’m not exactly sure what that means, I did it and now have beautiful permalinks. Thanks dude!

  11. Matt Browne Avatar
    Matt Browne

    You guys did better than CNBC, you made the _National_ Nightly news. I posted a link on my blog, mattbrowne.com. Great work!!

  12. Traffic Web Domain Avatar
    Traffic Web Domain

    i read an article. they said better using yourwebsitedotcom/category/blah-blahblah.html than yourwebsitedotcom/category/blah-blahblah

    is it true ? i still learning 🙁

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