Permalinks for Newbies
Posted on January 12, 2008
Filed Under Blogging for Newbs, SEO Tips
If you are launching a new blog then you no doubt have your work cut out for you. It seems like no matter how hard and long you work at it, the site is never the way you want it to be. Rest assured this is perfectly normal and you aren't alone.
This article is intended for those who are just starting out with Wordpress as we will discuss some of the basic steps you should take once you have your blog set up. I am not going to cover anything to do with uploading, installing etc but rather the things you need to do to get your blog "ready" to be on the worldwide web.
Time spent early in this stage will pay off for you in the long run.
First thing right out of the gate....change your permalink structure. If you look at your "links" that show up in your browser window you will see see that Wordpress defaults to a funky looking link, this is awful for SEO (search engines) purposes and will make your blog difficult to navigate and difficult for search engines to categorize. Take a look at the example below.
What you want to do is go to your Dashboard, click on the "Options" Link, click on the "Permalinks" link and then review.
You can see what I have done; click the Custom box at the bottom and type /%postname% in the field and save your update. What this will do is create a permanent link to each of your posts that contains the postname. You have other options that will include the date, postnumber, etc, but it seems to be pretty widely accepted to use the postname as the permalink.
It is much more user friendly to both readers and more importantly Search Engines. This is what that ugly link above will turn into.
Much prettier....and again, much more search engine friendly. If you wait until your blog is established and has a lot of content, then making this change becomes a major pain in the butt....so set it up correctly right on day one.
My next article will discuss the plugins that you should install when starting a new blog so make sure you grab my feed - it's an article you won't want to miss!
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
Comments
One Response to “Permalinks for Newbies”
Leave a Reply
[...] don’t have to do much more than use a good SEO plug in like All in One SEO and change your permalinks and you will be in good [...]