One of the ultimate goals of any blog owner is to get traffic for their site and one of the best places to get 
traffic from is search engines. This is all common knowledge, but anything that improves a site’s performance in search engine rankings is worth discussing. One thing that impacts how much traffic individual posts from your blog get from search engines is the permalink structure that the blog uses. Permalinks are the URLs that are assigned to individual blog posts.
The default permalink setting from Wordpress will assign a URL to your individual blog post that will make it appear in the form of your domain name, followed by the post number it is in your blog’s structure. While some people like this setup because it makes keeping track of posts easy, it isn’t always the best in terms of search engine optimization because the URL contains no information about the blog post itself.
Using Wordpress, it is possible to change the permalink structure so that the URL for the blog post will consist of something other than the post number. Some of the other options that are selectable in the admin panel of Wordpress are:
Day/Name - Using this structure, following your domain name you blog post’s URL will be the year, month, and day, followed by the post’s name. This is a good way to get the name of the post into the URL and also provide the information regarding when the post was written.
Month/Name - Using the this structure, the blog post’s URL will consist of the domain name, the year, the month and then the post’s name. This is another way of getting the post title into the URL but shortens it some by eliminating the day it was written from the structure of the URL.
Numeric - Using this structure, the post’s name is not included in the URL, instead the URL is shown in the form of domain name, followed by the word “archives”, and then the number associated with the post.
Any of these is a valid selection when choosing a permalink structure, but you can also use a customized structure as well. The two most popular ways of customizing a Wordpress blog’s permalink structure are by using the following commands:
/%category%/%postname% - Using this structure, and the post’s URL will appear in the form of domain name, followed by the category it has been posted in, and finally the name of the post itself. This has a couple advantages in that it not only includes the title of the post, but also a keyword that describes it (the category).
/%postname% - This structure has two advantages, it accomplishes the important task of getting the blog post’s title into the URL, but it also makes for very short URLs which many knowledgeable people in the search engine optimization field say is also important.
While not as obvious as building your blog with quality content or building numerous backlinks to your blog, constructing permalinks that make your individual posts work for you is a smart and important step in creating a blog that will not only inform or entertain your visitors, but also rank well in search engines and be easy for potential traffic to find.
One more thing if your interested here are five great ways to get more traffic to your blog.
