SEO and Permalinks

[jay]

Permalinks are the the URLs or addresses to your blog posts, as well as categories and other lists of your postings. A permalink is what another website or blog will use to link to your post or page. Since the URL to a blog post should not change and should remain unchanged indefinitely, hence… it’s called the permalink.

In WordPress, the default permalink looks like:

http://www.example.com/?p=N

where N will be a number. This is ugly and not search engine friendly. What we prefer to do is to change this permalink to the search engine friendly version where your post title appears in the URL itself. Examples:

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

OR

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

These beautiful permalinks look more pleasing to the eyes too, don’t you think so? The more important thing is of course not for our eyes, but for the search engines.

Structure Tags

You can use the structure tags to customize your "Pretty" or "Almost Pretty" permalinks.

%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 (see note below)
%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.