Understanding WordPress Permalinks
What is the world is a Permalink?
Permalink is how a URL of a WordPress post and/or page appears to a visitor and search engines. By default
your WordPress URL will have a bunch of numbers and will say something like “page ID = 32″ – which
means nothing to a user or to a search engine.
These urls will stay this way until you change it, this should be one of the very first things you should do
after installing your WordPress blog. This is because once you post your first page, search engines begin
to index your blog based on the post URL and if you change it at a later date then you will lose your
rankings and the old links will no longer work.
So let’s get started on how to edit your Permalink structure.
Editing Your Permalink Structure
1. Login to your WordPress dashboard
and click on “Settings” then “Permalinks”.
2. On this screen you will see several options. You should choose “Custom Structure”.
In this box you have a few options based on how you structured your site…
/%postname%/
This structure will display the post name in the URL. This is a good standard if you are unsure what format
to use. This is also good if your posts cannot be efficiently categorized well.
/%category%/%postname%/
This structure shows what category your post belongs to, then the title of the post. Here is an example. –
www.domain.com/shoes/womens-running-shoes
Here are some other structures that may be good for your specific blog
Year & Category: /%year%/%category%/%postname%/
Time sensitive data: /%year%/%day%/%hour%/%postname%/
Optimize author names: /%author%/%year%/%postname%/
Edit Your Post-Specific Slug
After you create your post, WordPress will automatically generate a “slug” for your post. Depending on the
title of your post it could be very long and contain extraneous words that should be removed.
Before you push “Publish” on your blog post, you should edit the link to only have keywords. Remove words
like “the”, “and”, “a”, “you”. This allows your links to be focused, short and search engine friendly.