Oh, the Places You’ll Go

WordPress Permalinks, Making sure your post can be Found.

WordPress is a wonderful too, but there is one default that I almost find funny. The way each blog post is named after your .com/ is a question mark followed by p= and a number. Your 128^th post will default to .com/?p=128 – the 128^th page.

Logical. Clear. Translates into any language that recognizes numbers.

Absolutely no use for readers, nor for search engines unless I happen to be searching for ?p=128. Just for info Google list 1.3 million ?p=128 results and Yahoo over 2 million.

Customize Your Permalink Structure

Which of these two links tells you something about the topic of the post that is presented on the website?

http://cindyking.biz/?p=128
http://cindyking.biz/information-products-can-save-your-business-in-a-slow-economy/

Both get you to your destination, but the top option - the default - does nothing to help a reader get an idea of your post. If someone does a Google search for information products, slow economy, they may find your site.

This setting can be changed in WordPress 2.5 by going to Settings and selecting Permalinks and in earlier versions of WordPress by going to Options and selecting Permalinks.

The WordPress Codex defines Permalink types as There are three basic types of WordPress permalinks:

Default: “Ugly” http://example.com/? p=128

mod_rewrite: “Pretty Permalinks“ .com/category/post-name or .com/year/month/day/post-name

PATHINFO: “Almost Pretty“.com/index.php/yyyy/mm/dd/post-name/

The available tags are:

• %year% the year
• %monthnum% the month number
• %day% the day of the month (16, not Tuesday)
• %hour%
• %minute%
• %second%
• %category%
• %author%
• %postname%
• %post_id% The unique ID # of the post, for example 128

I think the %postname% is the best option, but if you have a “Weekly Favorites” then you either include a date in your title or add in %year% %monthnum% %postname% so people can ID what week is in question.

Can you imagine using the minute or second tag? I can’t. %post_id% %postname% would appear as http://cindyking.biz/?p=128/information-products-can-save-your-business-in-a-slow-economy/ and that just looks a little too odd for me.

The WordPress codex offers /%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/ as a good start. Your boat, you go float in it.