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In case you didn’t know, Permalinks are the permanent URLs to your individual weblog posts, as well as categories and other lists of weblog posts. A permalink is what another weblogger will use to refer to your article(or section) , or how you may send a link to your story in an email message or post it on a social bookmarking site. Especially when they are used to link to individual posts, once a story is posted, the URL to it should be permanent, and never change. Hence … permalink 

If you are a new beginner using WordPress, having an optimal URL structure for your blog is very important firstly because search engines love it and bring in more people to your blog. Also, once your links are linked back by the various websites out there or indexed by the search engines, it can become very difficult to change your permalink structure as they will then lead to broken 404 links.

An optimal URL structure will not have numbers or strange characters in its permalink. A permalink or the URL of the post should help the visitor decide the contents of the post better.

Here is an example of a poor URL structure for a wordpress blog:

http://www.example.com/2007/04/19/archives/p=?420

Instead, here is an example of an efficient URL structure for a wordpress blog:

http://www.example.com/category/post-title

Having such an optimal URL structure makes your blog a lot more user friendly than the default options in wordpress as shown below. More importantly, you will increase your search engine rankings as a lot of search engines give a high weight for keywords present in the URL structure.

So, how do you change the permalink structure in your wordpress blog to this optimal URL permalink structure?

In Wordpress, go to Options and then select “Permalinks”. Then, click on the “Custom, specify below” option and in the custom structure, insert “/%category%/%postname%/ “. This will make your permalinks display the cateogory of that post and the post title right after your domain name.

Many people would suggest that you go with just the post name after your domain name. While this is a good option, you can make it even better by including the category as usually all cateogories are keywords. Another benefit is that the cateogory names are automatically listed in Technorati as Tags.

Another good option for a Wordpress permalink structure is the

http://www.example.com/year/month/day/post-name

However, I think the date is not that important. Try to write timeless articles for your blog. Moreover, if you get lazy and ignore your blog for a while, say someone is searching for something on Google, even though your article might provide the answer, having a 2005/04 in the URL might make the user not click the article. So ignore the date part in the URL. 

There are a lot more options in Wordpress. Following is the list of Structure Tags you can use with a Wordpress Permalink structure

%year% :  The year of the post, four digits, for example 2004
%monthnum% :  Month of the year, for example 05
%day% :  Day of the month, for example 28
%hour% : Hour of the day, for example 15
%minute% : Minute of the hour, for example 43
%second% :  Second of the minute, for example 33
%postname% : A sanitized version of the title of the post. So “This Is A Great Post!” becomes “this-is-a-great-post” in the URI 
%post_id%: The unique ID # of the post, for example 423
%category%: A sanitized version of the category name. Nested sub-categories appear as nested directories in the URI.
%author% : A sanitized version of the author name.

These types of permalinks work on most systems without any problems, but there are still some conditions where problems occur.

Help !!! I have hundreds of articles in my blog and I wish to change the permalink structure without breaking any links

You need to use the Permalink Migration for a WordPress Blog using the 301 Permanent redirect.  Here, using the plugin mentioned in that post, we will tell the search engines and visitors to your blog who might have bookmarked a post on your blog using the year/month/date/postname permalink structure and redirect them to the same post but with the new permalink structure. Best part, search engines love it and you also transfer your page rank to the blog post with the new permalink structure.

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