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I wrote Mastering Pretty Permalinks in WordPress with the intention to introduce the concept of the best permalink structure for WordPress powered websites. This was a call to try to encourage people to organize their website, but beware of how the permalink structure might be overrode if you have a file folder name the same as a post and you are using the post name permalink structure.

It is obvious that I am going to say that the post name (formerly known as pretty permalink) structure or the /%postname%/ option in your WordPress Permalink General settings is the best structure.

However, I am going to go a step further. Search Engine Optimization is fun to play with in regards to your domain’s URL structure. It can be a way to optimize what your article is, other than just organization.

What we know in basic WordPress use for structure purposes are as the following:

Permalink Structure for Posts

We can control how our permalink structure can look whether by post ID, month and date and more. We can even designate tags and categories to these posts and call them to pages using custom WordPress queries. For example you can call a category and show only tags and a certain number of many posts.

The reason why the post name structure (/%postname%/) works best for a post is because it shows the post title closest to the domain, showing how important it is to the site. The structure within the web page itself will also emphasize this using heading tags (h1, h2, h3, h4, and so on.) Now, if you listed by category (and I have seen people recommend that), depending on how your category is labeled, you are telling the search engine that the category is far more important to crawl than the actual title of the post.

WordPress naturally has the base “category” as a name and you can group posts under those categories. It is okay to display your posts on your site in a category. Most people believe including categories makes your posts duplicate content. NO! It is only if you are posting the same thing again on your site or the same exact thing on another site (like if you do guest blogging.) The search engines are not dumb.

Now, here is the fun part as well as the tricky part. What if you do use the category structure? How can you make it clever enough to draw more attention to your title. WPCandy actually exercises this clever way by naming the category’s slug an action. Yes, just the slug as you can designate a different name pointing to a different slug.

Just some examples:

News is reports
Opinion is thinks
Tutorials is teaches

Pretty cool, huh? As a note, the posts do group under the general “category/category-name”.

In this, we are telling (using the WPCandy example) that WPCandy.com reports such and such title, giving it an actual sentence. And you know, it nearly makes this former English major cry happy tears. (Oh I am such a geek!)

Permalink Structure for Pages

Pages are kind of fun and since WordPress 3.0′s menu addition, your control over pages has increased with several options. You can use the older hierarchy structure with parent and child pages. Remember, pages in WordPress are normally known for being used for static content.

The older hierarchy structure adds the slug of the parent page into the URL structure. SO, if you have like a parent page and then three deep into children and grandchildren, your URL structure might get a bit long. That might not be a good idea for search engine optimizing as it takes away the importance of that page.

However, the hierarchy structure is not the only way. You can use the WordPress menu option in your WordPress administration (Under Appearance>Menus) to organize your website and keep your URL structure for your pages simple. You can publish a page without using the hierarchy and use the WordPress 3.0 menu to organize your website without adding more length to your page’s URL structure.

Now, both methods can be used and Google will pick up and group areas of your site that have been optimized as a group. For example, if you have defined that your main sections of your website are your ‘About’, ‘Contact’, and maybe… as an example say ‘Resources’, like I have here in Blondish.net, Google will pick up that structure if you do have a set up pages that are relevant to that main area.

As a note, We can also apply these techniques to custom posts types since WordPress 3.0.

In Summary

Your permalink structure is both a way to organize and help search engines, but can also be great in helping your visitors navigate your website. The best permalink structure to use in WordPress is one that is the most coherent for search engines to deliver the best results to potential visitors. Play around with your site and see what is best for you.

Recently I had a run in with coding with a client who had a developer put together a sloppy custom WordPress query in place of a proper loop. In fact, it was amazing because it was put in replace of code on a great premium theme by StudioPress. By the way, no it was not StudioPress who did it, so let me get that out of the way. They are good at what they do. Anyhow, the custom query was three different pieces of code: a section to show to first 5 most recent posts, and then two columns underneath Read More →

So you have content, but you are not sure you want to go with pages or posts. Well, it really is not that difficult. A lot of people put together a site completely in posts without few pages. Or they make a page and enable comments, depending if their theme has that coded into the page template. Even you can customize individual pages, since WordPress 3.0, you can customize individual posts. You also have the ability to adjust your menu from your WordPress admin panel to whatever you like if you have the wp_nav_menu php call into the theme itself. Read More →

Whether you just like to put up a personal greeting or have a site that has quite a few users, something a welcome message is nice. I have seen a few people put this together and have a centralized paged where users can log in, read the personal message, and then go on their merry way using the website. The code is really simple. This code calls the current user. If you want to only let people like contributors or other roles see the message, you have to adjust the level_0 to any of the levels corresponding with the roles. Read More →

In fact, I have been exercising this on a few sites for clients that wanted their users to not even be lead to the WordPress backend, even to edit their user profile. Theme My Profile works well with the plugin Theme My Profile, and were both created by Jeff Farthing. Of course, you can use this plugin by itself as mentioned on Jeff’s page for the Theme My Profile plugin. This plugin is a very nifty tool and eventually I will have it so profiles will be viewable too. Everything just takes time. The plugin works great and I have Read More →

I found a nifty WordPress plugin and this one themes your login page to conform with your current layout. It is called Theme My Login and it was created by Jeff Farthing. Now, this is different from the tutorial on theming your WordPress login page. As further explained on Jeff’s site, his plugin overrides the wp-login.php and profile.php pages. The plugin includes a widget you can place a login form in your sidebar too! Jeff offers a support forum for his plugin… well actually, he has authored a few plugins. As a side note, I will be blogging about another Read More →

Somedays WordPress Can Make You Want To Pull Your Hair Out! That’s why we’ve added a new weekly event for you to Kimberly Castleberry’s Facebook Fan page! Hey everyone, I’m Kimberly Castleberry and for those that don’t know me I’m a WordPress tech that specializes in supporting small and home business owners in getting the most from their WordPress sites without having to become geeks themselves! I run a number of events including #TribeTuesday and #FanPageFriday on my page throughout the week that provide you with opportunities to promote others as well as yourself. Check them out for more details. Read More →

Episode 2 of the Blondish.net Podcast is a little beginner coverage on blogging and SEO. I wanted to cover basics on SEO for the content and design. I do recommend in this post the plugin WordPress SEO by Yoast. I go over some advice for writing the title and the content of a post as well as a few tips for designers. As a reminder, this is a basic SEO. I will cover some advance SEO in future podcasts. The episode is a little over 15 minutes. Blogging and SEO