Using Permalinks to Draw Traffic to your Website

It used to be that information on the internet was static and only accessible by human read, but as more and more information piled up, it became necessary to devise a way for information to be better archived and more readily accessible and more permanent. It was in the early 2000 that the advent of permanent links or permalinks–a method to store a more long-lived URL for reference purposes, was created.

But, what are permalinks? Permalinks are a string of characters which represent the date and time of posting, and a few letters or symbols that identifies the author of the article or post. With this in place, if a post or article is changed, renamed, or moved within the internal database, its permalink remains intact. Likewise, if a post is deleted, its permalink in most cases cannot be reused.

So, how does knowing what a permalink is help an average blogger draw traffic to his or her website? Because if you let your system create a permalink for you–a default setting, you’re missing out on greater opportunities to optimize your site.

Here’s how you drive greater traffic to your site within Word Press:

Go to settings; then permalinks; then check custom settings and type in: /%postname%  And that’s it! Really simple. I’m betting that the tutorial I watched was before the current Word Press version, because one of the options you can now check says, “post name” – it’s probably exactly the same thing, but either way – you’ll want to change that default setting to the “post name” setting for greater optimization! For more detailed information, click on “help” inside your Word Press.

Under that setting in Word Press, you can further optimize your site by entering custom permalinks for categories and tags. If you leave them blank, the defaults will be used, which is okay, but not nearly as effective as a custom link which creates greater SEO (search engine optimization) and draws more traffic to your site.

It’s all about getting your website or your brand out there! The greater the optimization, the greater the traffic to your website, and more importantly, the greater the promotion and sales of your product!