Anybody who’s been reading blogs for long has an opinion about permalinks. They may not know that “permalinks” are the official name for it, but they will have an opinion. If they don’t, they probably haven’t seen enough blogs. “Permalink” is a scary-looking word, though, and some people may not be clear on what it means, so I’ll tell you.

What a Permalink is

A permalink is the URL where an individual post can be found on your blog. The word “permalink,” as particularly clever readers may have determined, stands for “permanent link.” For example, this post has a permalink of the following:

Pretty Permalink: http://www.bloggingaddiction.com/2008/06/25/clean-up-your-permalinks-for-better-search-traffic/

If you didn’t know what a permalink was before the above paragraph, it won’t have given you the full effect. You can’t understand why permalinks are important without seeing the alternative, so I’ll give you an example of that too:

Ugly Permalink: http://www.bloggingaddiction.com/?p=16

Yes, that’s a permalink too, but not a very nice one. Compared to the original, it’s shorter, but it gives no indication of where the link is going to take you. For search engines, it gives no indication of what the page has content about — a form of search engine suicide.

There are a whole lot of ways to create a Pretty Permalink, and there are a whole lot of ways to create an Ugly one, too. The difference between the two is pretty simple: a Pretty Permalink includes keywords of some kind, while an Ugly Permalink does not.

Most people who use Pretty Permalinks use the title of their post as their keywords. This is great, because it’s very descriptive of what the post will be about. (Sometimes it will not be descriptive of the post. In these cases, somebody needs to work harder on their titles.) Some even choose to include the category of their posts.

Why Pretty Permalinks matter

Why should anybody care whether or not they have keywords in their permalinks? The vast majority of the Internet, and probably your readers too, won’t check where a link will take them before they click it.

Still, your readers will benefit from permalinks anyway. What if they’re trying to get back to your post by typing in the URL and picking from the drop-down box? It will probably be a lot easier for them to recognize “clean-up-your-permalinks” than “p=16.”

The main benefit for using pretty permalinks comes from search engines, however. Simply having keywords in the URL of your post will make your post more relevant for those keywords. So your posts will rank higher in search engine results, more people will find your site, and you’ll get more traffic.

Okay, how do I switch to Pretty Permalinks?

If you’re using WordPress.com or Blogger, you get Pretty Permalinks as a bonus. WordPress.org doesn’t use Pretty Permalinks by default, but it takes literally 30 seconds to switch. Log in to your admin account, go to Settings, choose the Permalinks subsection, and switch from Default to Date and Name. Instant Pretty Permalinks.

(Note: if you want to have the category name instead of the date in your permalinks, select the Custom option and type /%category%/%postname%/ in the box. For more, check the list of Permalink structure tags.)

As a warning: if your blog has been online for a little while and people are already linking to your articles, changing your permalinks on them could result in Not Found errors. This, obviously, is not good. In this case, you’ll want to redirect your old ?p=16 links to your Prettified versions. WordPress.org does this automatically, so you can switch without worries.

Since risk is low and gain is sky-high, there’s no reason not to start using Pretty Permalinks immediately. Take a minute to remove the Ugly from your blog and start enjoying the benefits of added traffic.

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