3-25: Permalinks Video Lecture | WordPress for Beginners - Software Development

hello and welcome back in this video we
are going to be learning about
permalinks permalink stands for
permanent link permalinks are
essentially the URL or web address of
the content on your site including blog
posts pages categories in other lists of
blog articles ideally the URL to your
content should be permanent and never
change hence we call the URL a permalink
just a quick note if you're unsure of
what an URL or web address is an URL or
web address is simply the string of text
you type into the browser to access
content on the Internet
for example the URL or web address for
Google as wwo com by default WordPress
uses a URL format that contains symbols
and numbers without getting too complex
the question mark P equals 64 means
WordPress has assigned the post ID 64 to
the post we are currently viewing this
default format is not ideal for a couple
of reasons first is site aesthetics
currently the URL doesn't look nice at
all obviously we'd want every aspect of
our site to look nice including the URL
second we want the URL to our content to
be descriptive so we can determine what
content we are viewing simply by looking
at the URL right now it doesn't tell us
anything except a page ID the third
reason is the current format of this URL
is not search engine friendly search
engine optimization or SEO for short is
a topic we'll be discussing in the
future but in a nutshell when search
engines index is your content you'd want
the search engine to know exactly what
your content is about so it can be
indexed properly for example the URL for
our bora-bora post is currently P equals
64 the search engine will not know our
post is about bora-bora at first glance
because our URL doesn't specify anything
so when a user searches bora-bora on
google our post will not rank very well
because
as far as Google is concerned P equals
64 has nothing to do with bora-bora
permalinks settings in WordPress allows
us to determine the format of the URL
for our content hover over settings and
then click permalinks
WordPress lists several common permalink
settings here for you to choose from
and as the radio button indicates the
default sitting is currently selected
they in name will display the year month
and day in front of the post or page
title months in name will display the
year in months before the post or page
title numeric will display archives in
front of your posts or pages which will
have a numeric ID post name will display
the URL for your posts and pages as the
site URL followed by the post or page
title
when we cycle through the options
WordPress will automatically fill in the
permalink variables these variables lets
wordpress know what rules to follow when
generating the URL for your content you
can also specify a custom structure for
example if you want the URL for your
content to be the site URL followed by
category then post name each open slash
category wrapped by percentage signs
then slash post name wrapped by
percentage signs
many SEO experts agree the best
permalinks structure is simply the post
name by itself however some also say
adding in the post category will provide
an additional layer of search engine
optimization
select a sitting you prefer and then
click Save Changes
after refreshing our post we can see the
URL has now changed to the site URL
followed by the post title
currently our permalink settings is
using the post name as the slug we can
change the slug without changing the
post name simply click on the slug make
changes
click Save
update and view the post
as you can see the post slug has now
changed to bora-bora overview but our
post name stayed the same now when users
search for bora-bora on google our post
will be better ranked in the search
results as Google can see from the post
URL it's related to the search term
category and tag basis our URL prefixes
for category and tag archives we won't
worry about it for now as the default
settings are fine in most cases
permalinks can sometimes be a source of
confusion for new users of WordPress so
hopefully this video has explained and
answered your questions related to
permalinks we are almost nearing the end
of Theory Block B next we'll explore
some useful tools in WordPress
you