One of the great features of WordPress is the ability to change your permalinks. If you have a WordPress powered blog or website, you should really consider setting up some custom permalinks.
So what is a permalink?
Quite simply, it is a permanent link (URL) that points to a specific blog post. Once your blog post has dropped from your blog’s front page, it can still be found using this permalink.
In WordPress, the natural environment is a bit strange. Out of the box, your permalinks will look like yourdomain.com/?p=1231. Obviously this works, but it doesn’t look very good. It looks sloppy to your blog visitors and doesn’t allow you to include any keywords in your URL. For some low-competition long-tail keywords, a keyword-rich URL could put you on the first page of Google without even trying.
If you want to change your permalinks, you can easily do it in WordPress. Just follow these steps:
1.Open WordPress Dashboard
2. Go to Settings->Permalinks
You are now in the permalinks menu. You can see that you have a list of options to choose from. Many of them are based on date and name. You can choose any of the presets they have; The default value, day+name, month+name, or direct numeric. For me personally, none of these settings quite work.
I like to keep my permalinks very clean. I use the custom structure with the following value: /%Job title%/ (score included). That keeps my URLs very simple. Now when I make a new post, the URL will look like this: mydomain.com/title_of_post.
The way WordPress works is that when your permalinks are set up this way, whatever title you put on your post will be in your URL. Setting up my permalink structure this way has led to an increase in traffic. Every post I make now has a chance to rank organically in Google for long-tail keywords. I combined this Permalinks setup with the All in One SEO plugin and found myself ranking for a ton of long-tail keywords that I had no idea people were searching for.
I think the first step in WordPress setup should be the permalink structure. Don’t skip this step, it will be worth it in the long run. It’s important to do this when setting up your site too, because it will change the URLs of all your existing posts. By doing this step first, you’ll ensure that all of your posts have a shot at Google glory!
