Permalink is the url using which the world can access any individual posts at your blog. We know that all blogging scripts like wordpress assign a url/link for each of our blog post but those urls might not be optimal. Consider default permalink structure of wordpress blogs where every post is accessible by a link of type http://domainname.com/?p=123 which is the default permalink. These type of links are not liked by search engines, blog readers and any person won’t link to your posts using these links. So they have a lot of -ves because of which you have to select an optimal permalink style for your blog i.e optimal type of link for every blogposts.

Types Of Permalinks Used For Posts In Most Blogs

Traditional Dated Permalink - http://your-blogs-address.com/year/month/day/post-title/
This was the general style of urls in blogs followed by most of the persons especially magazine type blogs where the post date information is crucial. It does not have any advantage except the url itself tells the date when the actual post was/is made which may be useful for some blogs with daily content. demerits are it makes the url longer by 10 characters (10 chars for date) which do not help technically.This permalink is like must for daily news sites, magazine sites etc which are nothing but customized wordpress CMS.

SEO Permalink - http://your-blogs-address.com/post-category/post-title/
This is the permalink structure usually followed by auto updating blogs are best for SEO as they include rich keywords in the url itself which is a common search engine optimization (seo) tactics. But this permalink type has many flaws like blog readers won’t digest this harsh & long url say yourblog.com/category/post-title & is only good if you use short titles or custom short slugs for every posts. Another technical problem is that if you make a single post under more than one categories the first of the selected category’s name/slug would appear in the /category/ part of the link so you can’t control which cat to appear in link. The most serious problem using it is when u delete a category all the posts using that category in the /category/ part permalinks won’t be accessible and will give 404 page not found error. So your posts within a category would be lost/in-accessible even tough they are present & moved to the default category(there a new permalink with this default category is created but that old link was indexed in search engines so that’s a prob). There may be a fix for these plugins please check out in Google Search. I used this and switched to next type after above mentioned problems.

New Generation Style - Simplest-http://your-blogs-address.com/post-title/
This is a new generation permalink style which gives each post a link/url like domain.com/post-title which looks appealing as it gives following impression - domain.com is main page & domain.com/post-title is one of it’s sub page i.e. it’s according to the link structure of a normal website(not blog). This makes people remember url of your individual post & makes permalink shortest possible.Again it makes your urls simple in both blog reader’s & technical view.Technically it has no problem & is perfectly structured. Best possible posts navigation is possible through this permalink if you have a sitemap at your blog. Top bloggers like John Chow especially experienced ones use this permalink style. Also i use this here and switched to this type recently because of advantages. You can check bellow for tips on changing permalink structure of established blog. One of my experience with a friend suggests - when normal people look this permalink structure at your blog their first impression is that the link would be permanently available in future but they think that the blogs with permalink domain.com/2008/11/12/post-title are temporary & clutter up this world.

Custom Permalink Structures
You can have a custom url for posts in your blog say domain.com/2007-11-12-post-title, which is an improvement upon the Traditional Dated Permalink mentioned above or domain.com/category-name-post-title etc but it depends on you. An advice is not to put category-name in the permalink url as it poses above mentioned problem. domain.com/archives/post-title is also another top one but why use archive word in all urls.

How To Change Permalink Structure In Wordpress
Open admin panel of your wordpress blog & under options tab visit the permalink menu or sub tab. There choose any option according to the permalink you want. You get domain.com/post-title permalink if you choose custom permalink and write /%postname%/ in the text box near to it.

Check details on using wordpress permalinks here. But before activating a permalink structure make sure you have .htaccess file in root directory of your blog which should be writable by the user.(chmod to 644 to make it so) That was for Linux hosting with apache server, for others check here.

Switching To ANother Permalink Even After Your Blog Has Many Links & SE Indexed Pages WIth Old Links- Permalinks Migration Plugin
This is very important if you want to change permalink structure even after your blog is popular & gets traffic from links & google search with old permalink. If you set a new permalink style then all those links & search engine visitors using that old permalink can’t access your blog. You loose traffic & many other things like juice from links to your posts. So you need to redirect old permalink urls to new ones for which have to use Dean’s Permalinks Migration Plugin for wordpress. All old permalinks are redirected to new ones & are interpreted so by search engines so all visitors & juices be intact and google would soon change the links to new permalinks. Details of usage of this plugin while switching to a new permalink style for an established blog(not loosing traffic & search engine) can be obtained here at author Dean Lee’s blog. let me quote the usage -

Goto admin panel->options->PermalinksMigration.set the old permalink structure of your site.

Goto admin panel->options->Permalinks.change the new permalink structure to what you want. (personally I recommend /%category%/%postname%/)

So they were few thoughts on choosing an optimal permalink structure for your blog and we would have more such tips related to blogging.

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