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[treehouse presents]

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[Quick Tips:Customizing Permalinks in WordPress with Zac Gordon]

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Hi, I'm Zac.

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In this Treehouse quick tip, we're gonna talk about

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how to customize what the URLs look like on a WordPress site.

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WordPress uses a term Permalinks to refer to the URL 

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for a specific page or post on the site.

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Having good Permalinks makes links to your site easier for people to read

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and easier for search engines to index.

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Let's take a look at some of what's possible 

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with Permalinks and WordPress.

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Start in the admin area and go to Settings, Permalinks.

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You can see that by default WordPress displays pages 

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with a question mark, P=, and then the ID of the page or post you're looking at.

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While this is technically clean,

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it's not that friendly for humans or search engines.

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You can see that the next two options--day and name and month and name--

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display the year, month, and date; or just the year and month

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as well as the name and the title of the post.

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These two options are great for blogs or for newspapers

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or for sites that want the month and the name and the year

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to be in the URL of the posts.

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The next option down, Numeric, is similar to the first option

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in that it shows the post id number at the end of the link

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but it doesn't include the ?P, and instead just says archives.

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If you want your site to have the id number 

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of the post and page in the URL

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then this is a slightly cleaner and nicer option than to default setting.

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This last option here, Post name, is probably one of the most common,

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especially for sites that are using WordPress for more of a CMS

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and not just for a blog engine.

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It could also be useful for blogs that only want to have the title of the URL

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in the links and not have anything about when that article was published.

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You could see that as we select any of these it updates

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the custom structure field below.

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If you want a certain Permalinks structure that is not here,

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you can click on "a number of tags are available" link here

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 and see all of the possible options that you have.

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For this situation we're just gonna select Post name

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and then click Save Changes.

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You can see it now says "Permalink structure updated,"

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which tells us that everything has been saved

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and our site is now using this format for the URLs.

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If you save your changes and you see a message that says,

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"You should update your htaccess now," and if you scroll down to the page,

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it gives you the content that should go inside of this htaccess file.

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Now you have one more step to do.

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For directions on how to do that, click on this link "A number of tags are available"

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and then on the WordPress documentation page

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find where it says "Where is my htaccess file?"

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and follow those directions there.

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And that's how you format Permalinks and WordPress.

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Experiment with what works best for your site

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Remember that if you have the post name and the URL

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then you want to make sure you have strong key words in your title names

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to help with your search engine optimization.