Wordpress Permalink Structure

In wordpress, you have the option of setting up a custom permalink structure to make the links on your site look nicer, and to help optimize them for google and other search engine. To setup a custom permalink structure login to your wordpress, go into settings, and then select the “Permalink” option.

 

Go down the page a bit and select “Custom” and now you can enter your own permalink structure. Here is the syntax:

year=/%year/ , post name = /&postname%/, category=/%category%/ (You get the idea…)

Depending on if you have mod_rewrite enabled or not, and whether you are on an IIS (windows) server, you may have to included “index.php/” at the begining of your structure. The structure used on this site, which is hosted on an IIS server is as follows: index.php/%year%/%category%/%postname%.html


This structure, in my opinion, is ideal. It not only looks clean, but it gives you all the information you need about the link just by looking at it. You know the year, so you can determine if it is recent or not, then the category of the link, and of course the post name. The .html extension on the end is optional. Some people belive it helps with search engine optimization, but no one has really confirmed this. Some people also opt to end their links in .php. The cleanest look is if you simply end in with a trailing slash, like this:index.php/%year%/%category%/%postname%/

So now that you have all the infromation, go ahead and give it a try! Get pretty permalinks!

Note: There are some other things required for doing this on IIS servers that I will write about in a later post.