Basic Tips: How to Change Permalinks or Pretty Links

Login to your WordPress Dashboard. Now navigate through Settings >> Permalinks. Here you can change your permalinks as you like and make it SEO friendly. You will find here 4 predefined permalink structure. You can set them. There's also a box called Custom, You can define your own permalink structure here. You can set deferent variable here to make it your own. Here's some example variables.

• %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
• %post_id% The unique ID # of the post, for example 423
• %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 URI.
• %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 URI.
• %author% A sanitized version of the author name.

Note: Your server must support mod-rewrite (or equal) to use Pretty Links. And your .htaccess file will also have to be writable by webserver. If it's not writable WordPress will give you some lines of codes so that you can edit your .htaccess file manually.

Advanced Tips: Change Permalinks without affecting Google

After indexing your site by search engines, If you think you need to change the link structure, I am sure you must be worried about the indexed links. Because the indexed links are valuable and on the other side broken links will affect on SEO. But don't worry man, I am here. And you know I have the solution.

Use the Dean's permalink plugin and relax. How to use:

• Unzip and upload the file into your wp-content/plugins/ directory.
• Activate it on your Admin Panel->Plugin Management page.
• Goto Dashboard>>Settings>>PermalinksMigration. Set the old permanlink structure of your site.
• Goto Dashboard->Settings->Permalinks. Change the new permalink structure to what you want.
• Done,enjoy it.

More Details on Permalinks: http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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