As you set up your blog, you’ve probably discovered that there are decisions to make every step of the way. Some of these decisions, like the way you format your permalinks, can impact the performance of your website. Let’s chat about the best option for structuring the URLs on your blog.

Episode Highlights:

• What is URL Structure?
• Which Option is Best?
• Do I Need to Change My URL Structure?

Resources Mentioned:

https://www.wpexplorer.com/change-permalinks-wordpress/

If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts so we can help as many teacher business owners as possible:

Looking for more organic traffic resources?

Dive into my signature course: Bring Your Own Traffic!

Check out my favorite places to look for fresh blog post ideas!

Or if you're ready to hire support for blogging and Pinterest, check out my services.

(affiliate link) My favorite place to keep my blogging and Pinterest assets organized.

Let's connect on Instagram

Mentioned in this episode:

My 37 Favorite Places to Find Blog Ideas

Save yourself the decision fatigue of figuring out what to write about each week. Grab this FREE time-saving guide that will help you blog more confidently and consistently: https://stephanieroyer.podia.com/blog-post-ideas

ONLY AVAILABLE IN DECEMBER 2024 - Grab your free blogging planner today

To celebrate my December birthday, I’m sharing a free blogging planner with all of my podcast listeners. This planner is jam-packed with everything you need to track your blogging goals, expenses, keywords, content creation, and more! If you’d like to grab your free blogging planner, just head over to stephanieroyersolutions.com/podcast.

Stephanie 0:00

As you set up your blog, you've probably discovered that there are decisions to make every step of the way. Some of these decisions, like the way you format your permalinks, can impact the performance of your website. Let's chat about the best option for structuring the URLs on your blog.

Stephanie 0:19

Hey there, teacher business owner. It's time to give your bank account a break and pause that ad campaign. I'm your host, Stephanie Royer, and I'm going to show you how to pay less for traffic.

Stephanie 0:31

Welcome back to the podcast. This week, we're going to continue discussing some of the behind the scenes decisions we make as bloggers that can have an impact on the overall success of our websites. One of these decisions is how to format the URLs for each of the pages and blog posts on your website.

Stephanie 0:52

I know we were talking about building a house in our last episode, but we're going to switch analogies for this one. Imagine that you just purchased a shiny new filing cabinet for your student files, and you need to decide how you're going to label them. Now, obviously it's best if you use the same system for every file you add to the cabinet. You don't want to start by putting student last names first on some of the folders, and then first names first on some of the folders, because your eyes will have to shift back and forth depending on what file you're looking at. It's better to just have it all formatted the same way. Another option, maybe you're going to decide to label and organize them based on birth date or something random like that. But no matter what you decide, it's important that that format is the same for every folder that you put in that cabinet. So the permalink structure is essentially the filing system that you choose to use for the pages and blog posts on your website. In your website settings, you can decide which structure you want to use, and there are several choices for this. So I wanted to go over each one and let you know which option would be best for your business.

Stephanie 2:05

So all URLs typically start with https colon, forward slash, forward slash, and that's known as the protocol. Then after that is your domain name, and that's just the name of your website. And going back to our house analogy from last episode, your domain name is the address for the house that we were building. And then after your domain name, there is a forward slash, and then the rest is the permalink for your page or your post, that's where it begins. And so this is where users and search engines can always expect to find this content. So that's why they call it the permalink. As long as this page exists, you can find it here, so that permalink part of your URL, that's where these options are. So if you log into your WordPress dashboard and you click on Settings then permalink, you'll see six options to choose from. Option number one is a plain permalink - your post, or your page will just be assigned a number, and it's going to be attached to a question mark, the letter P, and an equal sign that's all. That's the permalink. The problem with this is that it doesn't give you your users or search engines any context as to what the post is about before clicking on it. And this is really bad for SEO, and it's bad for user experience. Option number two is a day and name permalink. So after your domain name, there will be the year, then a forward slash, then the numerical month, then another forward slash, then the date, then a forward slash, and then finally, the name of your post. Then option number three is the month and name permalink. So it's going to have everything mentioned for option number two, just minus the date. It just has the month and the year. The problem with options two and three is that you're dating your post. Search engine optimization requires a lot of content updates you want to show Google that your content is fresh and relevant. So as a blogger, when you're trying to create this evergreen content, it can really undermine your posts if people can clearly see that this post was written five years ago. Now you can adjust the publication date on the post to reflect the date you most recently updated it, but the date in the permalink is going to stay the same unless you create a new post with a redirect. And then the other issue with options two and three is, I mean, you heard me outline all the different components that became long and bulky and just difficult to share. Option number four is a numeric permalink, and it's very similar to the first one, the plain permalink that I mentioned, because it's just assigned a number. The difference is that this one just has the number, and it doesn't have the equal sign and the letter P and all of that. It's just the number. The downside to that is going to be very similar to the downside of option number one, there's just no context for Google or your users or yourself. So then option number five is the post name permalink, which is just your domain with the forward slash, and then the title of your blog post. Option number six is a custom permalink structure where you can decide which combination of all of this information you'd like to use. So when it comes to setting up your blog for Success on Google, the URL structure that is most commonly used in the blogging world is option number five, the post name, permalink. The reason for this is that the URLs are just concise and easy to share. They provide important context for users and search engines for what your blog posts are about. And this format also makes it easier to update your blog posts, because you aren't permanently attaching a date to your content in that permalink structure,

Stephanie 6:16

You might be listening to this episode and thinking, Uh oh, I chose a different permalink structure. Should I change it? Can I even change it? And the short answer is yes, I say it with hesitation, and I'll tell you why in a second, but the short answer is yes, you can change your permalink structure at any time by going into WordPress to that menu I mentioned earlier and selecting the option you want. Your URLs will automatically update to this new structure, but you could potentially create a pretty big problem for yourself by doing that, because every place that you've ever shared the original link will now end up with an error if people click on that older URL format. So if you have been sharing that URL in a Facebook group, or you've created a bunch of pins with that URL, or Google has indexed your website and associates that piece of content with that older URL structure. So changing that permalink structure is changing your whole filing system. So Pinterest, the Facebook group, Google, they cannot find that piece of content now because it has moved to a different location. So just like if you move and to a different house, you have to file a Change of Address form with the post office. If you were to update your permalink structure, you need to inform everyone about this change to your filing system, because everyone needs to be able to figure out where your content now lives. And so the way you do this is with redirections. That way, if someone comes to your website from a pin that used the old link structure, they will automatically be sent to the post through a redirection. Over time, the bots that crawl your website will figure out the new filing system, but it will take time. There are things you can do to speed up the process, like submitting a sitemap, but really, that's more detail than we probably need to go into in a podcast episode. I will leave a link to a great tutorial online about how to go about changing your URL structure. But let's answer one more question. First, should you change your URL structure to the more common post name format, I would say, if you have a numerical URL with no keywords in the permalink, I would be way more inclined to say yes than I would if you used one of the date structures. At least with the date structure, you have the post name and keywords in the URL. Ultimately, though, it's up to you, if you'd like to make this change on your website, just be sure to invest the time needed to update the URL structure with the correct redirects, because you want to make sure that everybody can still find your awesome content.

Stephanie 9:19

I hope that this episode has given you a little more insight into why we structure the URLs on our websites the way we do. You're communicating important information to users and Google about the content that's included on each page and post of your website. Don't panic if you didn't use the standard format. Don't worry, because it can be fixed or honestly ignored, depending on what you'd like to do.

Stephanie 9:45

Moving forward, next week, we're going to continue chatting about how you can set up your blog for success. Be sure that you're following the pay less for traffic podcast to be sure you don't miss the latest episodes.

Stephanie 9:58

Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. If you enjoyed this conversation, I'd love it if you could share it with a teacher biz bestie. You have created high quality resources. Now let's help teachers find them. I'll see you next time.