Basic WordPress training: Setting your permalinks
One of the first tasks you need to perform (before creating any content) is deciding upon a permalink structure.
What are Permalinks?
Permalinks are the permanent URLs to your individual blog posts and category pages (more about categories later). A permalink is what other sites on the internet will use to link to your blog post or article. They are named permalinks as the URL to each blog post should be permanent; if it changes, any links created to that post will be broken. For this reason, it’s important to set a permalink structure you’re happy with prior to starting your blog.
Choosing your permalink structure
By default WordPress generates permalinks for your blog posts that look like this:
http://example.com/?p=123
‘123’ is the post id. This has several disadvantages. Not only does it look ugly, it isn’t very useful from a search engine optimization point of view; it doesn’t tell search engines or humans anything about the subject of the post.
It’s much better to use what is known as a pretty permalink structure, which might look more like this:
http://example.com/post-title/
Instead of the post id number, the URL will now be generated using the title of the blog post or page you’ve created.
[ezcol_1quarter]You can change the way WordPress generates your permalinks very simply.
From the right-hand menu, choose Settings>Permalinks.
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[ezcol_1quarter]Simply check the permalink structure that you’d like. I would almost always advise going with the Post Name option; it will be the most unique and offers the most pertinent information.
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Another option is to enter a Custom Structure. If you have a very clear category structure for your posts in mind, it might be worth going for a permalink structure that looks like this:
http://example.com/category-title/post-title/
[ezcol_1quarter]This will tell visitors and search engines the name of your site, followed by the category in which the post they are reading appears, followed by the title of the blog post.
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[ezcol_1quarter]Whichever structure you choose, scroll to the bottom of the page and click Save Changes.
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