Optimize Your Permalink Structure

Your blogs permalink structure is an important and often overlooked aspect, but one you should put some thought into. Your permalink (permanent link) is the exact URL of your individual pages and is what other website will use to link to you.

So why are permalinks important?

The default permalink structure for most blogging platforms are very basic and uninformative. The default format is usually something like this:

www.yourblog.com/?p=123

This format is just plain ugly and offers no usable information to your readers and it certainly doesn’t help you with Search Engine Optimization. The good news is that with a few small changes you can make your permalink a lot more useful and possibly give your self a boost in the Search Engines (depending upon who you ask).

So what are my options?

While I’m sure that most blogging platforms have similar options and configurations, I’m going to stick with how to change your permalink in Wordpress.

To access your Wordpress permalink options click on “Options” -> “Permalinks” in your Wordpress admin panel. You will see that you have several standard options already available and a custom option. Your items should look something like this:

Default
» http://www.avgjoeblogger.com/?p=123

Date and name based
» http://www.avgjoeblogger.com/2007/07/23/sample-post/

Numeric
» http://www.avgjoeblogger.com/archives/123

Custom, specify below
Wordpress offers a lot of options and you can use any of the following tags in your Custom Wordpress Permalink Structure.

%year% : The year of the post
%monthnum% : Month of the year
%day% : Day of the month
%hour% : Hour of the day
%minute% : Minute of the hour
%second% : Second of the minute
%postname% : The title of the post (or Post Slug)
%post_id%: The unique ID # of the post
%category%: The category name
%author% : The author name

What is the best permalink structure?

While a lot of people will tell that “this is the best way” or “that is the best way”, I don’t think there is a clear winner. Before deciding on which structure to use you should ask yourself what information will be beneficial to the reader. If it offers no benefit then there really isn’t a reason to include it.

Right away you should be able to rule out using the “Default” and “Numeric” options because these offer no value or useful information to the reader about the content of the pages. If having the post date a permanent part of the URL is important (news or time sensitive information) then the “Date and Name Based” structure may be a good one for you. However, if you need more control over how your URL’s look then you’ll want to specify your own structure in the “Custom” area.

When defining your own custom permalink structure you can use any of the tags I have listed above. A common custom tag, and the one I use here, is: /%category%/%postname%/. I like this structure because it gives the most valuable information, category and title of post.

Warning

If you have been blogging for a while, changing your permalink structure may cause your inbound links to break. Changing from the default structure, www.yourblog.com/?p=123, to a new permalink structure should be fine. However, if you are changing from another custom permalink structure you will probably want use the Permalinks Migration Plugin to make the change more manageable.