A permalink or a permanent link, refers to the URL of an individual blog post. A permalink never changes, and hence, the name. The unchangeable nature of a permalink makes it less prone to link rot. Permalinks are used to link your story in an email, and are used by other bloggers to link your blog or a section of your blog. Another important use of permalinks is the information they provide to the users regarding other posts in the same category.

Since people keep adding fresh content to their blogs all the time, an entry on a blog is visible easily only for a short duration of time. Permalinks are important for blogs than any other kind of website, because in conventional websites, new content is added via deep linking, whereas in blogs new content is published directly on the front page. Thus, you need permalinks to access pages that are no longer visible easily on the website.

While selecting your permalink structure, you must include keywords that are relevant to your topic to make your permalink more search engine friendly. Another way to make your permalink rank higher in search engine listings is to include the category or the post title in your permalink.

Today, permalinks are used for several other purposes. They are being used for link tracking and link tracing in blogs.

There are basically three types of permalinks:

1. http:// xyz.com/?p=N

Here, N is the post ID number. This type of permalink works well on different kinds of server environments, but don’t look very appealing.

2. htt p:// xyz.com/year/month/day/post-name

This is the most commonly used format of permalinks.

3. h ttp:// xyz.com/index.php/yyyy/mm/dd/post-name

These are called pathinfo permalinks.

You can configure permalinks on WordPress by clicking on Options tab on the dashboard. You can also add tags to customize your permalinks. For instance, to make your permalink point to a particular post, you should end your permalink with %- postname% or %post_id%. It is recommended that you start your permalink structure with a numeric value rather than the name of the category or the author. This is because, when you place a text, it takes longer for WordPress to distinguish between page URLs and post URLs.

It is important that once your WordPress blog is live, you do not change the structure of your permalink. However, if you wish to change your permalink to make it more search engine friendly, you should follow certain steps carefully otherwise you can have issues with your old URLs. Now that you know the basics of permalinks, you can make your blog rank high in search engine listings.

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Category: Internet/Domain Names
Keywords: link rot, permalink, permanent link, search engine listing, search engine optimization, SEO, ranking