The WordPress Permalinks Settings page lets you establish the way you want WordPress to assign URLs to the posts you will be inserting into your blog. These settings are very important because they are instrumental in rendering your blog items search engine and user friendly. ‘Permalink’ is the short form for ‘Permanent Link’ and it indicates the URL by which everybody can point to a post of yours on the web.
The Permalinks Settings page contains the following entries:
- Common settings - By default WordPress assigns to a new post an URL including an automatic progressive number. So, for instance, a post could be getting an URL like “http://www.yourwonderfulblog.com/?p=3421″. An URL like that is technically perfectly functional for WordPress, but certainly it tells nothing to both search engines and users about the contents of your post. Therefore, it is advisable to change the URL assigning rule by ticking on the ‘Day and name‘ or ‘Month and name‘ option proposed on this settings page. Personally, however, I usually select the option ‘Custom Structure‘, which, by using tags, allows you to build your URL names according to your detailed wishes. The Custom Structure I normally declare here is ‘/%postname%/%post_id%‘. It instructs WordPress to assign to each new post an URL made up of the post title plus the automatic progressive number above mentioned. So I get, for example: “http://www.mywonderfulblog.com/how-to-use-wordpress-and-google-adsense-to-earn-money-online/?p=438′. An URL like that is undoubtedly much easier for the search engines to find whenever a web user carries out a web search relating to WordPress, Adsense or the topic of earning money online. Furthermore, it becomes easier also to handle such URL when you have to link to it from another post or blog or site. Here is a list of the tags you can use to customize your URL naming method: %year%, %monthnum%, %day%, %hour%, %minute%, %second%, %postname%, %post_id%, %category%, %tag% and %author%.
- Optional - If you wish, you may enter custom structures also for your category and tag URLs. To do that, you just need to set appropriately the entries ‘Category base‘ and/or ‘Tag base‘ in this settings area. Normally, I do not use these options.
It must be kept in mind that Permalinks are just like that, i.e. PERMANENT LINKS. If, after having inserted posts, you change the permalinks naming structure in the Common Settings area, all of the previous permalinks will be modified accordingly. As a consequence, the search engines will keep pointing to the old URLs of the posts that they had already scanned before and they will not be anymore able to find your posts when a web user clicks on the search results he/she is given by the search engine. It might take quite a long time to search engines to reshape their maps of your blog to reflect the new URLs of your posts. Therefore, choose your properest URL structure at the very beginning of your blog and then just STICK TO IT!
WordPress + Google Adsense = you can begin earning online right today
