If your wordpress hosted blog has URLs like http://www.example.com/?c=2254, don’t you find it confusing and hard to memorize? Don’t you want to change it to something better like http://www.example.com/2010/03/sample-post/  or http://www.example.com/cat-name/samplepost/

Permalinks denotes how the URL  structure of a WordPress powered post appears.  From the technical point of view, your webserver should be running Apache with mod rewrite module in it.  It’s always advisable to check with your web-hosting service provider if they support wordpress in their servers.

How to setup your Permalink Structure?

It’s always advisable to prioritize and setup the permalink structure of your blog just after installing WordPress. The reasons, search engines which index your blog based on the URL, might find it hard to track such changes resulting to which you may loose your search engine ranking resulting in a fall of traffic to your website.

To configure the permalink structure of your blog, click on the “Options” tab in your WordPress Dashboard and then select “Permalinks”

A screenshot of the same has been shared below:

a)

b)

You may choose from any of the top 4 options in the “Common settings” and define the URL structure of the blog. In case you want to customize further, choose the 5^th option as shown in the above screen shot.

You may have a look at the common syntaxes below to customize your permalink structure.

%year%  – The year of the post, four digits.  Example: 2004

%monthnum% – Month of the year. Example: 05

%day% – Day of the month. Example: 28

%hour% – Hour of the day. Example: 15

%minute% – Minute of the hour. Example: 43

%second% – Second of the minute. Example 33

%postname% – A sanitized version of the title of the post (post slug field on Edit Post/Page panel). So “It’s Great Post!” becomes this-is-a-great-post in the URI (see Using only %postname%). Starting Permalinks with %postname% is strongly not recommended for performance reasons.

*** Note – this has been changed and is ok to do since ver. 2.0

%post_id%  – The unique ID # of the post. Example: 423

%category% – A sanitized version of the category name (category slug field on New/Edit Category panel). Nested sub-categories appear as nested directories in the URI. Starting Permalinks with %category% is strongly not recommended for performance reasons.

%author%  – A sanitized version of the author name.

Now that you know the importance of structured URLs, it’s time to take some time out and change the URL to something that will direct more traffic to your blog and website.

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