Pretty Permalinks Can Help You in the Search Engines

July 7, 2008

By Kevin D. Hendricks

by Kevin D. Hendricks

One way to improve your search engine ranking is to use what are called “pretty permalinks.” Permalinks are the direct and permanent links to your blog entries. It’s what websites use to link to your content.

By default, WordPress creates permalinks that are short and ugly. They look like this:

http://www.mysite.com/?p=206

It doesn’t mean anything to anybody, especially search engines. One way to make your permalinks more user friendly—and more search engine friendly—is to use pretty permalinks. They look like this:

http://www.mysite.com/title_of_your_post

You can change this under Settings: Permalinks in your WordPress backend. You can choose of the options for permalinks or use the custom field. Adding

/%postname%/

to the custom field will you give pretty, easy to decipher urls like the one above.

You can also get fancy and insert the year, month and day or the category name. If you’re already launched your site and didn’t use pretty permalinks, it’s not too late—there’s a plugin that can help. Read more about changing your WordPress permalinks or check out our tutorial video on pretty permalinks from the 7 Tips series.