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Good day everyone. Today's screencast is going to be another quickie and today we're going
to be covering how to correctly create search engine friendly urls in WordPress - and we're
going to do that by adjusting the permalink settings
in your WordPress website. So, without further hesitation
lets get logged into my own website here so I can show you how to do this....
Okay so just real quickly in case you're not exactly sure what search engine friendly urls
even are let me just give you a brief explanation to
what they are and what we're going to be doing. First of all,
in case you don't know what a url is its just another fancy word for web address. So....this
address up here address up here in your address bar in the
case of a regular desktop machine this is your url. It generally
starts off with your domain name followed by a forward slash and then whatever the name
of the page is.
Let me actually clarify a little bit - a good search engine friendly url will be your domain
name followed by forward slash and whatever the name of the
page or post happens to be. In this case I'm showing you what the urls
in WordPress look like right out of the box so before you do anything to your permalink
settings these are the default types of permalinks that you'll get.
As you can see they're just simply made up of page IDs. Now if you
don't know anything about search engine optimization, one thing that search engines look for are
urls that are relevant not only to what somebody may have
typed into google or bing or whatever search engine they happen to
be using at the time but also relevant to the content thats on the page and that's why
urls are so important to get right and they're so easy to correct with
WordPress that its worth taking the 45 seconds worth of work that it's
going to take you do it; it's worth it to do it so that's why I wanted to create this
video real quick.
So I am going to show you how to go to the backend of WordPress and make this a search
engine friendly url so let's do it. Okay so we're back in the backend of
my own website again and we're at the permalink settings now just in case
you don't know how to navigate to where I am on the backend of your WordPress website
you're simply going to go over here into your menu and you're going
to go under settings and permalinks right here and I've I went ahead and I
changed my own permalink setting to the default settings which is what you're going to see
once you do...right after you do a fresh installation of WordPress and this
is the setting that generates those very non-search engine friendly urls
that we were looking at before you can see right here there's the page ID that gets generated
with php.
Now depending on how you're using your WordPress website there are two ways to fix this; if
you do NOT have a blog within your website, in other words, if you're
not using the blog functionality that is native to WordPress - and you
don't have to, there's nothing wrong with that - then you can simply go ahead and choose
"post name" as your permalink setting - save changes - and we're going to
go here to the website and as you can there's still the funky page id as the
url, but when we refresh the page we'll see that the url refreshes and updates to a nice
search engine friendly url. It's the domain name forward slash and the name of
the page which is "in person services" which is perfect, it is exactly what we want.
Okay so if you caught what I was saying just a minute ago you heard me say that this setting
right here, I am going back to the backend "the post name setting" was
perfect for you if you were NOT using the WordPress as a blog, or rather,
if you did not have a blog as part of your website then this is the perfect setting to
use nothing else needs to be done. But, what if you ARE using the blog functionality
of WordPress and your website DOES have a blog contained within it? Well,
fortunately for the purposes of this demonstration, the website that I am using to demonstrate
on DOES have a blog so let me show you how, if you are using the blog functionality
of WordPress, how you can actually make this url a little more friendly
and I'll go a little bit deeper into it here in just a second here. Let me jump over to
my blog page and you can see, following everything that I've said up to this point
it looks like it's a pretty search engine friendly url, right? Here's the
domain name then the forward slash then "blog" which is the page that we're on...but what
if I choose a specific post within my blog in other words scroll down a little
bit....ummm.....lets just do this blog right here
So, if you know anything about blogging in WordPress, if you've ever used WordPress as
a blog, you'll know that when you create a blog post in WordPress you're
forced to have that post be within a category and even if you don't choose a
specific category, WordPress itself will put your post into the "uncategorized" category
so no matter what, you're always going to have a category for each and every
one of your blogposts and if you notice here for this particular blog post
that I wrote called "Know your Themes" you'll see after the home page here, which in this
case is the blog, the category that we're in is "WordPress DIY" or WordPress
Do it Yourself, and you notice up here in the url we're missing the category,
we can actually have that category listed as well as the page, or in this case, the
post, the name of the post. So, what we're going
to do to fix that is we're going to jump out to the backend again (give me just a second
here), Okay, so here we are in the back end again and you'll see this radio button
next to "post name" is still checked so now what we're going to do is
we're going to make it so that the url is "so friendly" that not only will it give us
the domain name as well as the page that we're on but if someone is looking at
one of our blog posts it will, the url will actually say the domain name forward
slash the blog, or rather I'm sorry, forward slash the category that the blog post is in,
forward slash the name of the actual blog post - and, I'm going to
show you how to do that right now. So, rather than leaving post name checked
we're going to go down to "custom structure" and I'm just going to delete this right here
and I'm just going to start by putting the forward slash and you're going
to see I've actually already used this before so I don't have to bother to go
through and type it out, I'll just leave it up on the screen long enough for you to copy
for your own purposes. It's basically what they've provided here with a forward
slash with the symbol for "percent", the word "category" and close that with the
symbol for percent, another forward slash, we're going to open with the symbol for percent,
"postname" percent and then the forward slash again. So I'm just going to
leave that there for you for just a second so you can copy that down ......and then I
am going to save the changes once again and we're
going to go back out to the front end of my website, go back to the main
blog page and as you can see up here we still have stwpress.com forward slash blog which
is fine because this is the page right here that just gives you the header
and a snippet of each blog post, but we're going to go back to this "Know Your Themes"
blog post and click on that and as you can see back up here in the url we have a completely
perfect search engine optimized friendly url. We now have stwpress.com, which
is the domain name, forward slash word-press-diy which is the category that this
post...that I put this post under, and then the name of the post itself which is know-your-themes.
So there you have it. I hope this was a helpful screencast for you. I hope I didn't make it
too long but I wanted to explain what was going on every step of the way to
you. So, if you have any comments, suggestions or questions please leave them below
and I will do my best to get back to you as soon as I possibly can. Thanks a lot for watching
and have a great day.