How to Create the Best URL Structure and Permalinks for WordPress Blog Both SEO Friendly and User Friendly

Updated on December 1st, 2012 by Quertime Team in WordPress

WordPress URL structure by default is neither search engine friendly nor user friendly. It will greatly affect your ranking in Google and other search engines. In this article, we have summarized the WordPress Codex on using permalinks for your easy understanding. We will also show you how to make a good URL structure for your WordPress blog, both SEO friendly and user friendly. It will not only increasing your chances of ranking higher in search results, but also letting your visitors know the article what it is about by just looking at the URL.

Permalinks
Permalinks are the permanent URLs to your individual weblog posts, as well as categories and other lists of weblog postings. There are three basic types of WordPress permalinks:

1. Default WordPress permalink
http://example.com/?p=N
(where N is the Post ID number)

2. mod_rewrite permalinks are the most common and versatile WordPress permalinks and they look like:
http://example.com/year/post-name/
http://example.com/year/month/day/post-name/

3. PATHINFO permalinks look much like mod_rewrite permalinks but they have /index.php inserted before them:
http://example.com/index.php/yyyy/mm/dd/post-name/

Note: A WordPress plugin called RewriteRules Viewer is helpful to display the type of permalinks being used and detailed information on the internal rewrite rules used by WordPress.

How to Choose Your Permalink Structure

1. Go to Settings and select Permalinks

2. You can choose one of the “common” structures or enter your own in the “Custom Structure” field using the structure tags.

We recommend you the following permalink structures for your individual weblog posts:-
/article/%postname%/
/post/%postname%/

3. Click Save Changes button
Now your .htaccess file will automatically be updated, and your URL will be changed.

Note: You should never put your site URL in the permalinks slot. You must use one of the structure tags, or a combination of tags only.

Structure Tags
You can use the tags below to customize your permalinks. At the same time, please take note the hints below:-

You should end your structure with either %post_id% or %postname% (e.g. /%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/).
It is not a good idea to start your permalink structure with the category, tag, author, or postname fields for performance reasons.
It is best to have at least two path segments in your post’s permalink structure such as /%year%/%postname%/ or /posts/%postname%/.

%year%
The year of the post, four digits, for example 2004

%monthnum%
Month of the year, for example 05

%day%
Day of the month, for example 28

%hour%
Hour of the day, for example 15

%minute%
Minute of the hour, for example 43

%second%
Second of the minute, for example 33

%postname%
A sanitized version of the title of the post (post slug field on Edit Post/Page panel). So “This Is A Great Post!” becomes this-is-a-great-post in the URL).
(Note: Starting permalinks with %postname% is strongly not recommended for performance reasons.)

%post_id%
The unique ID # of the post, for example 423

%category%
A sanitized version of the category name (category slug field on New/Edit Category panel). Nested sub-categories appear as nested directories in the URL.
(Note: Starting permalinks with %category% is strongly not recommended for performance reasons.)

%author%
A sanitized version of the author name.
(Note: Starting permalinks with %author% is strongly not recommended for performance reasons.)

Category Base and Tag Base
The Category base and Tag base are prefixes used in URLs for category and tag archives. The default values for these are “category” and “tag”, which look like this:
http://example.com/category/category_name/
http://example.com/tag/tag_name/

(Source: WordPress Codex for Permalinks)