Customizing Permalinks in WordPress

[treehouse presents] 0:00 [Quick Tips:Customizing Permalinks in WordPress with Zac Gordon] 0:02 Hi, I'm Zac. 0:05 In this Treehouse quick tip, we're gonna talk about 0:07 how to customize what the URLs look like on a WordPress site. 0:10 WordPress uses a term Permalinks to refer to the URL 0:14 for a specific page or post on the site. 0:17 Having good Permalinks makes links to your site easier for people to read 0:20 and easier for search engines to index. 0:25 Let's take a look at some of what's possible 0:27 with Permalinks and WordPress. 0:29 Start in the admin area and go to Settings, Permalinks. 0:32 You can see that by default WordPress displays pages 0:39 with a question mark, P=, and then the ID of the page or post you're looking at. 0:42 While this is technically clean, 0:49 it's not that friendly for humans or search engines. 0:51 You can see that the next two options--day and name and month and name-- 0:56 display the year, month, and date; or just the year and month 1:00 as well as the name and the title of the post. 1:05 These two options are great for blogs or for newspapers 1:10 or for sites that want the month and the name and the year 1:14 to be in the URL of the posts. 1:18 The next option down, Numeric, is similar to the first option 1:22 in that it shows the post id number at the end of the link 1:26 but it doesn't include the ?P, and instead just says archives. 1:30 If you want your site to have the id number 1:36 of the post and page in the URL 1:39 then this is a slightly cleaner and nicer option than to default setting. 1:41 This last option here, Post name, is probably one of the most common, 1:45 especially for sites that are using WordPress for more of a CMS 1:49 and not just for a blog engine. 1:53 It could also be useful for blogs that only want to have the title of the URL 1:57 in the links and not have anything about when that article was published. 2:02 You could see that as we select any of these it updates 2:06 the custom structure field below. 2:11 If you want a certain Permalinks structure that is not here, 2:15 you can click on "a number of tags are available" link here 2:19 and see all of the possible options that you have. 2:23 For this situation we're just gonna select Post name 2:27 and then click Save Changes. 2:30 You can see it now says "Permalink structure updated," 2:33 which tells us that everything has been saved 2:37 and our site is now using this format for the URLs. 2:39 If you save your changes and you see a message that says, 2:44 "You should update your htaccess now," and if you scroll down to the page, 2:47 it gives you the content that should go inside of this htaccess file. 2:52 Now you have one more step to do. 2:56 For directions on how to do that, click on this link "A number of tags are available" 2:59 and then on the WordPress documentation page 3:04 find where it says "Where is my htaccess file?" 3:07 and follow those directions there. 3:11 And that's how you format Permalinks and WordPress. 3:14 Experiment with what works best for your site 3:17 Remember that if you have the post name and the URL 3:20 then you want to make sure you have strong key words in your title names 3:23 to help with your search engine optimization. 3:26

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