How To Set Up WordPress Permalinks ?

Permalinks are the file names of your individual blog posts. If you want to create a link to a post, then you have to use the permalink of that post to create the link.

This is how WordPress defines Permalinks:

Permalinks are the permanent URLs to your individual weblog posts, as well as categories and other lists of weblog postings.

WordPress offers five different settings for permalinks:

1. Default Setting
   By default every post in WordPress gets a unique id. This id is called the ‘post id’. The id becomes the file name of the post. So my post about ‘tunturi treadmills’ will look something like this http://www.imbizjourney.com/?p=344.

   Pretty ugly, non-descriptive and also does not help for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) purposes.

2. Day and name
   This is good but still not good enough. The date fields are just unnecessarily increasing the name of the file. The ‘name’ part of the permalink is the important part in this setting. But it is at the end of the setting – By having it at the end, it is probably not helping with SEO much.
3. Month and name
   Same story as the previous one. The important part of the file name is at the end (‘name’). So again good but not good enough.

   And one more thing about dates – I normally don’t like to have them in the file names because the file names show up in the search results and by having the date in the file name you are basically aging your page.

   If a page has a date in 2008 in the file name and this page ranks number one for a keyword, will you click it ? – even though it is number one, it has a date which is telling you it is two years old and so why would you click it – especially if the second result for that keyword has a date in 2010.

4. Numeric
   This again is as useless as the the ‘Default Setting’. Non descriptive, does not help with SEO and ugly.
5. Custom Structure
   This is the setting I use. I type in ‘/%postname%/’ (without quotes) in the field. By doing this all my posts will have a descriptive file name at the right place – no unnecessary numbers and date – just straight to the important part. Here is an example – http://www.imbizjourney.com/tunturi-treadmills/.
   
   

   Simple, elegant, descriptive and most importantly good for SEO purposes.

Are you using the right permalink structure for your wordpress blogs ?

Best,