WordPress Permalinks

Perma- what now?

For every post you write, WordPress generates one single page just with that post on it. The URL of that page is commonly known as its "permalink"; it's short for permanent link, the link where that post will always be found, even when it's moved off your blog's front page.

By default, WordPress permalinks look like this:
http://blogmum.com/?p=16
This is both bad and ugly: bad, because the "?" tells search engines that this is a dynamically generated page, potentially with unstable content, and ugly because - well, read it. It tells neither your human readers nor Google anything about what's on the page it links to.

It's much better to use meaningful permalinks like this:

http://blogmum.com/2008/11/keep-your-wordpress-blog-secure/

Not only can anyone looking at your URL immediately get an idea of what your post will be about, but search engines can see it too, which will increase your chances of being found for the keywords in your title (you *are* thinking about Google when you write your post titles, aren't you?).

How to make pretty permalinks

Fortunately, there is a fairly easy cure for this. In WP Admin, Settings > Permalinks allows you to set up human-readable permalinks in the style of your choice. WordPress gives you a range of elements you can include in your link:

Timestamp elements: year, month, date, hour, minutes and seconds
Post title and post number
Category and author of the post

Several of these are pre-set in the dashboard and can be selected by clicking the radio buttons; if you want to create your own style, choose the appropriate tags and type them into the "custom structure" box.

Which elements should you include?

Always include the post name; these words are a huge boost to your SEO.
Each permalink should begin with numeric data (year, or post number) rather than text: beginning permalinks with textual data can cause performance problems.
Each permalink should end with the post name (or the post number) so that a unique URL is generated.
If you've imported a lot of blog posts from another blogging system (e.g. Blogger), then mirroring the existing permalink style ensures that links to your old posts stay valid in WordPress.
Year, month and perhaps date can help human readers to see when they're looking at an old post.
Adding some numerical data (dates or post numbers) is advisable to prevent conflicts with other parts of your WP install.
Hours, minutes and seconds are probably unnecessary (if they seem necessary, maybe you should post a bit less often...).
If your blog has multiple authors, adding the author field to the permalink is an option.

Personally, I like year/month/post title: it's short enough, but meaningful to both human readers and search engines.

Need a shorter URL?

The cool thing about WordPress's behaviour here is that the old, ugly URL will still work: it just redirects to your new, sexy URL. So if you've got year and month and date and a long post title, and the resulting very long URL is going to break in emails or be too long for Twitter, you can still use the domain/?p=post_number one, and anyone using it will be redirected to your pretty link automatically.

If you need to find the post number, go into Manage Posts and hover over the post title: the last number of the URL in your browser status bar is the post number.

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