Wordpreneur.com

In A Few Top Google SEO Techniques, I mentioned a WordPress technique that tells it to automatically generate a post URL that includes some form of the post’s title, much like it does for this site (look up at the address bar!). Good for SEO, apparently.

Here’s how to do it:

1. Log in to your WordPress blog’s back-end as an administrator. You’ll see the Dashboard.
   
2. Go to Options.
   
3. Then Permalinks. This lets you customize your blog’s permalink structure.
   
4. Click and select the last option, Custom, specify below.
   
5. In the Custom structure text box, you can then enter and specify exactly how you want WordPress to customize your URLs. Wordpreneur’s, for example, is:
   
   
   
   /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%/
   
   
   
   which is almost self-explanatory! In this case, I’ve told WordPress that after the domain name, the rest of the post’s URL should then have the year, then the month, and finally the post’s title (rather, a version of it). Again, look above at your browser’s address bar for a real world example.
   
   
   
   I’ve listed the %options% structure tags available to you (at least what I can remember) below. But really, I suggest you keep those URLs simple.
   
6. Click on the Update Permalink Structure button. You’re done!

IMPORTANT NOTE: If your former permalink structure was not at the default setting, and you already have a well-established blog with pages that rank well on Google and other search engines — not to mention have pages that lots of other sites are linking to (backlinks) — changing your permalink structure may very well break all those links. Not the default link to your domain (www.whatever.com), but everything else.

So, think long and hard before mucking around with the permalink structure of an existing blog.

Structure Tags

• %year%
• %monthnum%
• %day%
• %hour%
• %minute%
• %second%
• %postname%
• %post_id%  (the unique ID# of the post)
• %category%
• %author%

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