Hey y'all welcome to another WordPress Wednesday. My name is Kori Ashton
and it's that time again in the week we get to nerd out on all things WordPress.
We're going to continue this month series on
blogs.
(Specifically talking today about permalink structure.
These are the links at the top of your website that you can copy and paste
and give to people so they can come visit your content, right?
These are the links that you take out and put on your social media.
You want them to look good (not only for your visitors but also for Google.)
What are the best practices when you're structuring your permalinks
for your WordPress website?
Let's pop into a dashboard really quickly.
To get to permalinks,
you would just go to 'settings'
and click on 'permalinks' and that will get you to this page.
By default, sometimes WordPress installs start off with this version
of what your path would look like (what your URL would look like.)
That's really ugly database lingo that you don't want there.
Some people say just to use this post name here.
This post name would be the actual name you give your post or your page.
If you called your page "About Us",
this would actually say (you know) yourdomainname/about-us right there
instead of it saying post name.
Do you understand?
It's pulling whatever you title it and having it appear there.
Best practices for utilizing your categories inside of this structure
could be an opportunity to sprinkle in your key term
(if you named your categories correctly for SEO.)
I talked about that in a previous video. I'll put the link to that video right here
so you can wrap your mind around what you should be naming your categories-
what are categories vs. tags (how to utilize that.)
Then, come back to here
and let's look at potentially using a structure
that could include your category name.
That's this structure here. Don't worry about
trying to remember this or read what it is.
I'll copy and paste this down in the description box below
so that you can reference it and just paste it in here.
The other thing you can do is, (some people miss this) right up here at the top
of this page you've got an option here to click on a link and it'll pop you over
to the codex to let you see what WordPress says are the best practices
for permalinks-how to use them.
Toward the bottom down here it'll give you a couple of different options that you can
include into the string
so that these things will dynamically pull from the database and be included
in the path
for your link.
What you want to do,
(just before y'all get crazy with this and get started on it)
is you want to set this up right out of the gate.
Right as you launch your website you want to be doing this.
As you start building your website content you want to have set this in place.
If you're coming back after you have a website that's live,
(if you're coming back after you've built several pages or lots of content
and you're trying to correct this restructuring because this is a better
practice)
what I want you to keep in mind is you could potentially break a lot of things
on your website (a lot of links.)
You could potentially frustrate Google
because they've already got a lot of your content indexed and now
everything's kind of switched around.
You're restructuring these links up here
and that could be a problem for Google.
I'm going to give you a link to this article in the description box below.
This is a company called, Yoast.
They produce (in my opinion) one of the best SEO plugins for free
in WordPress world.
This says how to change your WordPress permalink structure.
This walks you through the steps that you will take to change these
if you already have a website out there currently and you're trying to go back and
retroactively fix these things.
It's also going to walk you through some of the extra nerdy steps you're going to
have to take to set up 301 redirects and different things like that in place.
Be sure that you don't frustrate Google.
You might see a little lull in traffic
and then it'll pick back up after Google gets things in order again.
Best practices would be to include category and post name
however, (another quick issue I want you to keep in mind)
don't get crazy wordy!
Don't have a URL that's like 200 characters long because you thought you
would include
your keyword in that category three different ways.
Don't do that to yourself and don't do that to Google.
You're going to end up frustrating Google.
Google prefers seeing shorter URL's.
The shorter you can make this path, the better.
You want it to be user friendly so people could try to remember it
and people can kind of get an idea of exactly what sort of content they're going
to be visiting if they click that link.
I hope this helps.
I hope you're nerding out with me.
Be sure to stay tuned because this month we're going to wrap up the whole idea of
blogs (specifically inside of WordPress).
Here in our YouTube channel, we have over 200 WordPress nerdy videos like this
to help you-either the total beginner or
we even have some advanced crazy nerd code stuff.
Dig around-look on our different videos.
Hopefully we could help you.
If you can't find an answer to something,
be sure to comment in the description box below, give us tweet, jump over to Facebook.
Let us know what your questions are and we'll try to make a video for you.
Have a great one y'all! I'll see you next WordPress Wednesday!
Bye!