Permalinks and SEO! :)

Hi all,

Apologies for my being a bit of a hypocrite after saying I wanted to keep everything ordered in the one site relaunch thread and then starting a whole fresh thread, but I felt this was perhaps important enough to flag up as a thread of its own! :)

In said other thread, Mark & I were talking about the page names for the pages we're building in the new site, and I mentioned that I was sure there was a way that you could customise a page name in WordPress so that, instead of displaying as, say, http://www.thundercatslair.org/relaunch/?page_id=447, you could call it something like http://www.thundercatslair.org/relaunch/encyclopedia-liono (or whatever). :)

Now, I've recently subscribed to an e-mail newsletter by a lady called Lisa Sabin-Wilson, who is one of the world's leading authorities on WordPress, having set up a company specifically for setting up individuals and companies with blogs and CMS websites in WordPress, and she's also the author of "WordPress for Dummies". In the newsletter I received this morning, I was interested to read this:

WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks are simply the unique URL (or web address) that points to each, individual post you’ve published to your WordPress blog. Each post you publish is assigned it’s own URL and it is called a permalink (or permanent link to the post)

By default, WordPress post URLs look something like this: http://yourdomain.com/?p=1

That example basically tells the web browser to find the post with the ID of 1 on your domain and display it on the screen. It’s functional in its purpose, but it’s not very descriptive. Unfortunately, search engines, like Google, use the words found in the URL as part of the descriptive keywords to store it in their search directories. Having a URL that says ‘?p=1’ isn’t going to describe the content found within the page, so having that type of URL structure is pretty useless, when it comes to SEO.

I highly recommend using the built-in Permalinks feature in WordPress to spiff up those post permalinks to make them more friendly to the search engines - - help the search engines do their job, and they will help you back!

Login to your WordPress Dashboard and click the “Permalinks” link under the Settings menu. WordPress offers you a few choices for permalink structures - and I’m here to tell you that ANY structure is better than the default.

My recommended structure is using: %postname% This will create a permalink that looks something like this:
http://yourdomain.com/the-post-title-goes-here

The other options WordPress gives you insert things like the date and year into the URL string, but I think if you strip out all of the extras -- all of the noise -- and give the search engines exactly what they came for, your SEO will benefit. Using the %postname% structure gives the search engines actual keywords and content, which is useful for them when they are adding you to their search directories and will, ultimately, help internet searchers find YOU.

Now, unfortunately I don't have access to the Settings panel in WordPress that allows the assignment of Permalinks - AFAIK, only MannyF has access to that. :)

Could I suggest that Permalinks are something that would be very good for this website's hits on search engines such as Google, and put us above some of our rivals - for example, if someone searches for info about the episode "Exodus", it could benefit our Google ranking if the words "ThunderCats" and "Exodus" were in both the page name and the URL. :)

Just some food for thought - I'd very much welcome your input, gang! :)

Take care... :)

I went ahead and changed it so that it uses the post title as the url. Is that okay? So for example, the pages would look like this: http://www.thundercatslair.org/relaunch/collectibles/hard-heroes-statues

If not, we can try something different :)

Chris here...

"Manny, post: 29804" said:

I went ahead and changed it so that it uses the post title as the url. Is that okay? So for example, the pages would look like this: http://www.thundercatslair.org/relaunch/collectibles/hard-heroes-statues

If not, we can try something different :)

Hey Manny, this looks excellent to me, well done! For some reason it's broken the link to the Encyclopedia page but I can surely correct that. I'll let you know if I encounter any problems but at a glance, this looks awesome, well done! :)

Take care... :)
Merged Post:
EDIT: Just fixed the Encyclopedia link, checking for other broken links now but so far, so good! :)

Take care... :)

Nice work on this you two, I'll see if any of the pages I've done so far need changes but this is good work!

Chris here...

"grizzlor, post: 29812" said:

Nice work on this you two, I'll see if any of the pages I've done so far need changes but this is good work!

Hey Mark, I did have to change a few page links in the end in the Encyclopedia section (still not sure why there and nowhere else) but managed to find a quick-ish way of doing it - if you need any help LMK! :)

Even though having to change those links was a bit of a nuisance, IMO it was 100% worth doing for the SEO advantages that having the page titles displayed this way will bring - and, obviously all future links now will follow the new Permalink style! :)

Mad props again to MannyF for making this happen, you're a legend my friend! :thumbsup:

Take care... :)