Configuring WordPress Settings: Permalinks
This video is a continuation in a series of videos detailing each of the WordPress Settings pages. This video will focus on Permalink Settings.
Permalink Settings allow you to define the link structure that WordPress generates for each of your post. Permalinks are one of the few areas where the WordPress default settings are highly undesirable. One of the firs things you’ll want to do after setting up your WordPress blog is to modify your permalinks.
This video will show you how to easily setup human-friendly permalinks that should also perform well with most search engines.
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Comments
Hi Sim:
Permalinks is one of those things that used to be a lot harder in older versions of WordPress. These days, you just need to make sure that the application has permission to write to the .htaccess file. When you update the permalinks settings in the WordPress administrator, the mod_rewrite settings will automatically be written to your .htaccess file.
If the application doesn’t have permission to write to .htaccess you should see a message to that effect when you change your permalink structure. The message will also include the lines that should be added to your .htaccess file. Just cut and paste.
Kirk- Thank you for this excellent resource! I have a WordPress book as reference, but while it explains the ‘what’, it often fails to explain the ‘how.’ Every video of yours I have watched so far has thoroughly explained and shown what I needed to learn. Nice work!
Great resource. My concern is regarding the logic of categories and whether to use them in the permalink. I find it better to use category to define the type of post, eg. article, news, case study etc and use tags to define the topics or subjects that the post is about.
Now, it seems it would make more sense (from a search engine) point of view to have the tag displayed in the permalink rather than the category. However there are usually multiple tags and the one taken by the permalink is not necessarily the most appropriate and moreover categories seems more organized anyway.
What are your thoughts on this?
Thanks
@Sandeep – You make an interesting point. Not everyone will be using the Category as a descriptive label of the content of the post. In your case, using the tag in the permalink structure will work the same as using the category as recommended in this video.
If you use multiple tags, then I believe that all assigned tags will work in the permalink. In other words, your article will have multiple permalinks. There will be one primary link (likely the first assigned tag) that is generated automatically from index and category pages. But the other tags should work in the permalink structure as well. My concern is that this might lead to duplicate content in Google and other search engines. To avoid that you might want to leave the tag out of the permalink.
Hi Kirk, I am so glad I came across your WordPress resources. They have made things a lot simpler. When I saw the link for this video I was thinking this is what I have been looking for, however, I was a little disappointed that there was no mention of the difficult parts of using permalinks (which has been putting me off using them), namely the steps to do with mod_rewrite on the Apache server, getting the FollowSymLinks option enabled, creating and editing the .htaccess file etc. A little explanation into how to get all this working would be brilliant. Great resources, so keep up the good work. Best regards.