WordPress Permalink Structure

Since we want to create a well-structured web-site, we need to set WordPress up so that it creates SEO friendly URLs for your posts.  To do this, we need to edit the Permalink options.

Literally speaking, a permalink is link that doesn’t change.  e.g. when you write an article for your website, it is given a URL.  This URL is what you will link to if you reference your article somewhere else on the web.  You certainly do not want the URL to change – it needs to be permanent.  Get the idea?

Permalinks are the permanent links to your articles.  In WordPress, we can configure how those will look.

To change the permalink structure for your site, click on the Settings menu, and select Permalinks:

You will be taken to the Permalink screen that gives you various options for permalink structure.  Here are the first 4 with examples of what your links will look like:

Default http://mydomain.com/blog/?p=123

Day and name http://mydomain.com/blog/2008/08/01/sample-post/

Month and name http://mydomain.com/blog/2008/08/sample-post/

Numeric http://mydomain.com/blog/archives/123

We are interested in the 5th type of permalink – Custom, because it allows us to define how we want the links to be organised.  There are a number of variables you can use to define your permalink structure:

%year%

The 4 digit 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 name of the post (words separated by a dash)

%post_id%

The unique ID number of the post

%category%

The category of the post.

%author%

Author name.

You can combine these variables into a custom permalink structure.  Most of them are not very useful for an affiliate site.  What is useful to use is the %postname% and %category% variables.

Select , and enter the following:

/%category%/%postname%/

Scroll down and save your changes.  You can ignore the optional settings at the bottom.  Now, your posts will look something like:

http://mypetshop.com/dogs/beagle

Where beagle is the name of the post, and dogs is the category you posted it in.

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