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Website In A Weekend Reader Roberto K took the 101 coupon challenge and asked for an article on permalinks and redirection. This is really two articles to do it right, and I’m going to start with permalinks. Redirection is a much longer and more complicated article (you’ve been warned).
Because blogging is such a dynamic activity, with new blog posts and pages being created and deleted, defining exactly where a webpage exists on the internet becomes a problem. Permalinks help fix this problem by declaring a permanent URL for a web page, which is independent of the page title, or file name, or whatever. Since WordPress serves articles out of a database, the permalink represents a key to the location of the current version of the article. Good permalinks will help you drive the right kind of traffic to your web site: readers interested in your content.
What is a permalink?
A “permalink” is permanent link. A link on your blog that should never, ever change, for any reason. Everything else, title, content, whatever can change around the permalink. If you change the permalink, your readers will come to your blog and get a 404 Error: Content Not Found.
You do NOT want 404 errors!
Yes, you can set up redirections. That’s a hassle too: costs you time creating the redirect, costs the reader time to have the redirect served. Big hassle all around. Sometimes redirection is necessary, and as mentioned above, you will learn about redirects in a future article.
Creating excellent permalinks
Creating permalinks that are useful for readers and for search engines is a bit of an art. WordPress is designed to make permalink creation systematic, through the use of user-defined URL structure. A very common technique is using a WordPress Category name as part of the permalink, and appending the title as what’s known as a “slug.” For example, see the permalink in the screenshot below, where the post slug is in yellow highlighting:
Example permalink and post slug for WordPress
The screenshot shows a post slug taken from an earlier title for this article. The post slug was generated by WordPress from the new and improved title.
Creating great WordPress permalinks requires accurate, relevant categories for your general topic, and a post slug which is relevant to the blog post. Read “Choose 3 to 7 Posting Categories to More Effectively Focus Your Writing” to find out how to create great categories for your blog, and set up your general permalink structure in the Settings >> Permalinks menu. Now you’re half done and it’s time to talk about post slugs.
Creating really good WordPress post slugs
Post slugs are the trailing end of the permalink and represent exactly one blog post or blog page.
If you think of Categories representing books, post slugs should be like a chapter title in a book, or possible a section header within a book chapter.
A great post slug will have the following characteristics:
- Short, 3-5 words if possible.
- Accurately reflects content: Choose your most important keywords.
- Induces action: “solve-wordpress-problem” is better than “wordpress-problem-solve”
- Unique across your entire blog
- Should be independent of article title. Title independence provide 2 benefits:
- Allows changing post title for testing.
- SEO keyword opportunity, words in slug can be similar but different keywords than words in title.
- Helps keep article in focus: Use the post slug as well as the title during editing and throw out everything unnecessary.
Use the WordPress SEO Slug plugin to generate post slugs. If you don’t care for the automatically generated slug, SEO Slug will honor your changes. If you want to redo your slug, delete the existing slug and SEO Slug will regenerate one for you.
Feedback appreciated
There’s a lot of information—and misinformation—concerning the exact definition of slug and permalink. This short blog post is partly inspired by frustration finding exact definitions. If my definitions are incorrect, please let me know and point me at the canonical definition for both “permalink” and “post slug.” I’ll revise this blog post immediately.
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{ 2 comments }
The URL of my post titles does not reflect the category for it. It’s showing month and date and then html at the end of the link. Yours don’t show the date and html. Did you take them out? Is it more effective SEO wise to make these changes?
jan geronimo´s last blog ..New Twitter Social Proof: Are You on Everyone’s List Yet?
@jan,
Yours is probably better than mine, reasons to do with how wordpress deals with database access. There’s a long discussion on it. I set my
links before it came up.
Dr Wordpress!´s last blog ..Techsmith did it again with Jing Pro… sort of
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