Optimize Your WordPress Permalinks

I am going to teach you how to optimize your WordPress permalinks for better On-Page SEO, which is the first thing you need to do as soon as you have installed WordPress on your server. Learn how to create a custom permalink structure for your WordPress powered site, optimize them for Search Engines and why it is important.

1. Default WordPress Permalinks

By default, the WordPress permalinks for your posts and pages are very SEO-Unfriendly and look a bit like this:

http://www.domain.com/?p=1

If you know the basics of on-page SEO then you know how this is a problem. Basically the ending of your URL should contain keywords that reflect the content of that page or post. Not only is this more user-friendly (and looks less sketchy when people share links to your site) but it also helps tell search engines, like Google, what that page should be about (On-Page SEO is all about “Relevance”).

Your permalinks should be something like this:

http://www.domain.com/optimize-wordpress-permalinks

2. Optimizing Your Permalinks

Luckily WordPress does provide a very easy way to optimize your permalink structure. All you have to do is log into your WordPress admin panel and go to the following location:

Settings –> Permalinks

On this page, click on “Custom Structure” and then to the right you’ll want to enter the following:

%postname%

Now your permalinks will be created using keywords from your post or page title.

*If you notice I put a “.html” at the end of mine. I really like it because I have subfolders on my domain and it helps distinguish between the two, but it probably doesn’t do much or anything in terms of Search Engine Optimization.

3. Manually Editing Your Permalinks Per Page Or Post

After you set up your custom permalink structure you can also manually edit your permalinks while creating or editing your posts/pages. This way you can choose the exact words you want for your URL structure. To do so just click on the small “edit” button right under the field where you put in your post/page title (see image below). Makes sure to click “save draft” or “update” after you change it.

4. Advantages Of A Better Permalink Structure

The advantages of optimizing your permalink structure to a keyword-rich one are the following:

1. Makes your URL’s easier to read by search engine robots
2. Makes your URL easier to read in search engine results (may increase clicks)
3. Gives more weight to the words in your URL

5. Quick Tips For Better Permalinks

Changing the permalink structure works pretty well, however, you may want to edit them manually (as explained above) to make them even better then the default. Keep the following tips in mind when optimizing your permalinks.

• Keep them short -hopefully between 1-4
• Keep them relevant – make sure to choose the keywords you want your page or post to rank for(obviously they will be relevant to your content)
• Avoid “fluff’ words – don’t use words like: it, and, of, the…etc.

reboot is not the same as init 6

Here’s an interesting Linux tidbit that not many ESX admins realize.

reboot is not the same as init 6

In Linux, the init 6 command gracefully reboots the system running all the K* shutdown scripts first, before rebooting.  The reboot command does a very quick reboot.  It doesn’t execute any kill scripts, but just unmounts filesystems and restarts the system.  The reboot command is more forceful.

So, should I use reboot or init 6?  – neither!  My advice is to use the shutdown command. shutdown will do a similar job to init 6, but it has more options and a better default action.  Along with kicking off an init 6, the shutdown command will also notify all logged in users (logged in at a tty), notify all processes the system is going down and by default will pause  for a set time before rebooting (giving you the chance to cancel the reboot if you realize that you made a mistake).  Jolly civil.

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How does this advice apply to VMware ESX servers you ask?  Well I’m not a VMware kernel developer so to be honest I’m not the best person to ask (if you do know murky details, then please let us know in the comments).  However I will say this; I will always use shutdown -r first and foremost.  It’s just a better habit to get into.

Is there a difference on an ESX server? Yes, but as I said I’m entirely sure how it affects the VMkernel processes.  The reason I definitely know – a couple of times I’ve had to use the reboot command to force an unresponsive ESX shutdown -r.

P.S. This also applies to init 0 / halt (i.e. use shutdown -h instead).

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