Discussion: The Usage of Permalink
I still remember the first time I’ve used Wordpress, one of the word that caught my attention was the word “Permalink”. Just what is that? How is it useful? and what are “slugs” in wordpress? Check out the picture below.
Permalink to put it in a more simple manner is for the following :-
- To have your URL more human-readable instead of represented by trailling question marks with weird signs and numbers (sometimes these are known as query string). E.g. Susan previous wordpress does not have permalink setup, so her page has trailling question marks and numbers in it (http://www.somedomain.com/index.php?p=23. After setting up the blog with permalink, the url changes to a more human comprehensible form such as http://www.somedomain.com/2008/05/08/mountain-himalayas/
- Anything that is human readable is also search engine friendly, people end up finding your URL more relevant such as Susan’s case, her permalink to her blog post e.g. http://www.somedomain.com/23/05/08/mountain-himalayas/ is obvious somewhat related to the article about Mountain Himalayas.
Slugs are the words that represent your title of the post at the end of the permalink
- Let’s take Susan post for example, her article title is called Mountain Himalayas therefore, her slug by default is would be mountain-himalayas. You don’t have to mess around with slug for your article unless you have special characters or other language characters in it.
- Try posting an article called Today’s Topic and look for the slug once you save as draft, it will appear weird (encoded with numbers like %e2%80%99) because apostrophe is a special character and usually replaced with a number code, usually I just remove the number in my slug and make it more human readable as possible just to make it neater.
Is not compulsory to meddle with permalinks and slugs but, is advisable to do so, cause it makes your each of your post human, bookmark and search engine friendly.
