Found in settings, permalinks is one of the most ignored settings by users. It is critical that permalinks are properly established before creating pages, posts, or connecting to your social media channels.
What is a permanent link?
A permalink is a visual way to identify your pages and posts as presented in the address bar of the uniform resource locator (URL). By default, permalinks are set to an “ugly” web address that looks like example.com/?p=N. The N is replaced with an identification number (ID) (ie, 123).
What should a custom permalink structure look like?
Instead, you want a custom permalink structure to read your site using a search engine optimization (SEO) approach. When it comes to real estate blogging, you want to optimize your search engine results using what home buyers, sellers and investors are looking for, such as specific details about properties such as addresses, streets, locations, schools, zip codes, etc. This is true because many people type into search engines specific information such as addresses, street names, nearby schools, and zip codes where they want to buy their next home. Having this information in the URL structure will give you the added boost that search engines need to find your site organically (without paying advertising dollars).
We recommend that you change the permalink setting to /% postname% /. This will change the visual URL to the title of your page or post. For example, if you have a home at 123 Elm Street, San Diego, CA 92103, the URL would show: yourdomain.com/123-elm-street-san-diego-ca-92103
Do you know how important this is? Think about it – the street number, street name, city, state, and zip code are displayed. You can even add other details like the agent’s name, county, and household characteristics. It is unlimited! This is what we mean by optimizing your pages for search engines.
At a minimum, you should create custom permalinks; otherwise, you will lose a lot of search engine momentum and your work will be a waste of time and money.
The permanent link structure setup process
- Go to “http://yourdomain.com/wp-login.php” (yes, add /wp-login.php)
- Go to panel
- Hover over settings and click the permalink option.
- Select the “custom structure” radio button.
- Write in the box /% Job title% /.
- Click save changes.
- Preview the site to make sure it is working properly.
That is all! Now the URL will read the post title or your real estate blog page as the post name. Make sure that when you are creating titles for pages and posts, you use keywords from your keyword analysis, as part of your title. This will accomplish that part of SEO. Also, most of the titles on the WordPress real estate blog are wrapped in an H1 tag, which is preferred by search engines. One last note, 9 times out of 10 when the URL is not displaying correctly, it is usually due to a missing forward slash (i.e. /). Check that before doing anything else everything should work fine.
conclusion
Permanent links are important to promote your real estate blog online. The custom permalink structure provides search engines with the right tools to effectively search your real estate blog, as well as to beautify the display of your sites web address. Now when you post houses for sale it will read something like “http://www.yourdomain.com/1234-elm-st-san-diego-ca-92103-mls-900000”. Allowing this type of structure to be visible on your real estate blog is good for SEO and good for you when doing internet marketing.