Meet Your New Masters!
An alien race has conquered the earth.
And they are tired of our names.
So, they are going to give us numbers instead. I’m “1003453″ from now on.
Go on and check weareyournewmaster.com for your new name!
OK, I’m just kidding.
Nothing like that has happened.
I’m sure you felt bad. Not over the fact that earth was taken over but that you were going to lose your name! 
Weren’t you angry?
Our name IS our identity and losing it would be a disaster.
No one wants that to happen.
How can someone live with a name like 1003452? Wait, several poor blog posts live with names like that. To be exact, they are addressed like that by others.
Just think how sad they would be by such poor addressing. All this when owner can easily make them read “my-awesome-blog-post” instead of “100123123″.
Yes, I am talking about WordPress permalinks.
What Is A Permalink?
Permalink stands for Permanent Link. It is, well, a permanent link to your posts by using which others can link to your posts. Your posts can be accessed directly using it and readers do not need to go to your blog front page first and then search for the post.
Why You Should Permalinks?
Here are reasons for using Permalinks:
- SEO: If you plan to get good rank for your posts, SEO is a must. And SEO starts with the permalink. You should enable permalinks so that you can include intended keywords in it.
- Easy To Remember: http://yourblog.com/?p=123 is much hard to remember than http://yourblog.com/my-sexy-post . Isn’t it?
- Informative: A good permalink is informative and can give readers an idea about the post.
Which Structure To Use?
There are several types of permalink structures available to use. Here are the most common ones:
- Default: By default, WordPress uses “ugly” permalinks that look like http://yourblog.com/?p=2342 The random number is unique id of the post.
- Time Based: There are several time based permalinks available like http://yourblog.com/2010/2/3/your-post
- Category/Tag Based: These one look good. An example is http://yourblog.com/category/your-post-title
- Only Post Title: Another commonly used structure, it looks like http://yourblog.com/your-post
Wandering which one to use? Well, there’s no set rule. Post Title is the most commonly used. However, it is not exactly a good one as multiple posts can have same title and in that case you will end up with an ugly “2″ at the end of second post’s permalink. Use category based with title. For example: http://yourblog.com/category/your-post
They will not be hard to remember!
How To Change Permalink Structure?
You can easily change WordPress permalink structure by going to Settings -> Permalink and select either a preset structure or make your own using available tags.
Read more about structure tags on WordPress Codex.
That was all about WordPress Permalinks. Have any other tips? Do not forget to share in comments.
