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Oh my gosh, I didn’t know it was this easy.
For more than a year, I’ve created several websites using the WordPress engine for my sites, but one thing that always annoyed me was the URL structure of new posts. I would create a post and the url would look like this:
http://almostfreephone.com/?p=14
…even though the post was about some particular subject like the best VOIP service ever. I don’t think the Search Engines like that because it doesn’t clearly identify what it may be pointing to. For some reason, I have this feeling that search engines like the following structure instead.
Anyway, the quick “how to” on changing this is:
1) Open up your administration section of the website by just logging in. After you get the menu to show up from “Dashboard” to “Options” or “BackUpWordPress” (to the right) strung along the light blue menu bar up top, click on “Options.”
2) In the Options menu, you’ll see towards the center an option for “Permalinks” — click on that.
3) You’ll see the default option selected looks like the option above with “p=12″ or some other number. However, if you select the second option (”Date and name based”), you’ll have urls that I believe will not only look better, but track better with search engines.
Good luck!
Excellent post!
Not only are clean, search engine friendly URL’s good for search engine optimization, but they’re also just good in general when sharing links, etc. I wanted to make sure that my new WordPress site was free from PHP ID numbers in the URL.
Thank you,
Bayard
Thanks for the comment. Yah, I had a sneaky feeling for a year that I should get them much more clean looking. It just makes so much sense. Cheers.
Thanks for the article. I’ve used WordPress off an on for a few minor websites. Only recently have I used it as the major software in a project. I usually use CMS, therefore, my knowledge of WordPress was not that in-depth.
Thanks to your article I have MUCH more SEF URLs. Actually, you left one very important thing out. I figured this out quickly by playing around. You can have URLs of yoursitecom/article-name.
1.) Under the new version of WordPress, go to Settings > Permalinks
2.) Click on “Custom Structure”
3.) If you click on the text of “Day and Name” or “Month and Name”, you will see the %postname% tag.
4.) In the textbox of “Custom Structure”, type in /%postname%/
5.) Your URLs will not be yoursite.com/article-name
I researched a little bit and more info on permalinks is at http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks. For a listing of the tags, you can go to http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks#Structure_Tags.