I Am Blogging

Are you starting a new Wordpress blog? Then the first thing you should do is to change the default permalink structure. Wordpress assigns you a structure like

http://example.com/?p=post-id-number

by default. What can a reader make out from it? Simply nothing! Does it contain any keywords in it? The answer is negative again. As you can see, this permalink structure is neither user-friendly nor seo-friendly.
But there is an easy way to change it if mod_rewrite is enabled in your server. You can choose any Pretty Permalinks by going to Options ->Permalinks. You can choose user friendly structure like

http://example.com/year/month/day/post-name

or

http://example.com/category/post-name/.

You will have more keywords in the post url, making it seo-friendly. But remember good permalinks are “hackable”. Here “hackable” means users can modify the link text to go to a new section of the site. Now if you modify the first permalink you can go to yearly or monthly archives of the blog posts. But you can easily go to a specific category by modifying the second one. Readers tend to search category specific posts rather than time archives.
You can say that one can easily navigate to another portion of blog & there is no need for permalink for this purpose. But why should you take a chance? Who knows what one will do when he will receive an individual post link by email or from another blog! Besides, adding category to your permalink will add an extra keyword as the category itself. That is why

http://example.com/category/post-name/

is the best permalink structure. You cannot find this permalink structure in the list. For this you have to use Custom Structure option. Enter

/%category%/%postname%/

in the box & save it.

Related posts:

1. Redirect Traffic As You Migrate From Blogger To Wordpress
2. Should You Prevent Self Pinging in Your Wordpress Blog? If Yes, Then How?
3. Simplest Way to Show Only Excerpts Instead of Full Posts in Wordpress Blog