Before sit in front your computer start create your website, may sure you already have a website structure / site map. List down the categories and file names. A well organize structure not just can help you manage your website properly in future but also can help you on search engine optimization.

Avoid this kind of url name, “http://www.abc.com/d26/1234.html“. Don’t simply name your file name eg. 1234.html. Make sure the file name get keyword and related with the page topic. If your page is talking about Internet marketing, you can name it “internet-marketing.html“.

Don’t name it “internetmarketing.html” and “internet_marketing.html“, “-” is better than “_“. Google search is recommend that use hyphens “-” instead of underscores “_“. So the better url name is “http://www.abc.com/news/internet-marketing.html“.

For website you can control the url name by during saving the file and folder name, how about your self host WordPress blog?

How to change permalink in WordPress?

For those who using WordPress blog, by default the WordPress url is “http://abc.com/?p=123“. You can change the permalink setting in the “Permalinks” section.

Change the “Default” setting to “Day and name“, http://abc.com/2009/01/27/internet-marketing/ or “Month and name“, http://abc.com/2009/01/internet-marketing/.

Want more Pretty Permalinks, you can customize it too.

Customize WordPress Permalink
You also can customize the permalink by using “Custom Structure“. In “Custom Structure” fill in /%postname%-%post_id%/, the url become http://abc.com/internet-marketing-122.

Don’t just put only %postname% , it may make the post page cannot access. Plus if you want to list your site in Google News, one of the requirements is to have at least three digit identifier at the end of every url.

If you already have a lot of existing posts, changing the permalink structure will make your old links to those posts will result in page not found errors – to fix this you would need to install these WordPress plugin, “Permalink Validator“, “Permalink Redirect” or “Permalinks Migration“.

With these plugin, you can safely change your permalink structure without breaking the old links to your website, and even doesn’t affect your search engine rankings. If You don’t know how to install WordPress Plugin, click here to see how to install WordPress Plugin tutorial.

URLs name is part of the search engine optimization too, so don’t forget name your file name properly.