Wouldn’t it be great if after adding a new page to your site, the following happened … all from your web address:

• Visitors could quickly determine what the page was about,
• Google would be able to discover your posts faster,
• Each item of content on your site would have a unique ID, making things easier to manage.

Well, this is what permalinks let you do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

What Is A Permalink?

Permalinks are the permanent URLs to an individual post, category, or other taxonomy (a way to organize things together) like archives.

A permalink is the URL that other people use to link to posts or sections of your site or the links you send in emails pointing to articles on your site. Permalinks are often called “pretty” URLs.

Permalinks make the URLs to each post on your website permanent, hence a permalink.

Permalinks – Why Use Them?

Hopefully, you are probably aware that, WordPress is one of the best CMS applications you can use when it comes to publishing search optimized content.

WordPress is not only well optimized right out of the box, but its SEO aspect can be easily enhanced with excellent SEO plugins.

If you focus on the SEO aspect of your website, then you cannot ignore the importance of your URLs. Search engines like Google place considerable weight on the structure of URLs when indexing content.

Permalinks can be used to make the links on your site into memorable and more “search engine friendly” URLs. Permalinks also improve the usability, aesthetics, and forward-compatibility of your links.

Now … let’s take a look at the reason why it’s best to configure your permalinks in WordPress.

Normally, a default WordPress installation uses a link-naming structure for your posts that isn’t search engine friendly and looks like this …

The above link structure is used by WordPress to find information inside your database. It doesn’t really help your site with on-site search engine optimization.

As you can see from the screenshot below taken from Google search results, many WordPress site owners are still using out-of-the-box settings when publishing their content …

Although Google is still indexing the above sites, many site owners are potentially missing out on additional SEO benefits.

To get more SEO benefit from using WordPress and improve your site’s rankings, you will want to make sure to set up your permalinks structure to make it more SEO-friendly by displaying relevant keywords in your URL, instead of meaningless numbers and symbols.

WordPress lets you create a custom URL structure for your published and archived posts, so your content can go from this …

To something like this …

In this tutorial, you will learn how to set up your WordPress permalinks to display posts with search engine-friendly URLs instead of the out-of-the-box URL structure and help every new post you add to your site automatically get better indexing results in search engines like Google.

How To Change Your WordPress Permalinks

In your WordPress dashboard area click on, Settings > Permalinks …

This brings you to the Permalink Settings screen …

As mentioned earlier, by default WordPress web URLs use characters like question marks and numbers to create unique Post Ids and URLs. We want to create a “pretty” permalink instead for our posts. To do this, we will need to specify a different Permalink structure than the default.

Common Settings

In the Common Settings section, select Custom Structure, then add one or more ‘tags’ (see below) to create SEO-friendly URLs …

(Change your permalink settings to create search engine-friendly URLs)

If you use the custom permalink structure shown in the example above, your URL would look something like this:

http://www.mytravelsite.com/europe-travel/10-best-european-river-cruises

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=4402

(Using post name permalinks helps readers and search engines understand what your content is about)

Permalink Tags

“Pretty” URLs, or search engine-friendly URLs, are created by adding one or more ‘tags’ in the Custom Structure field:

• %year% – The year your post is published, displayed as four digits (e.g. ‘2010’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘06’)
• %day% – The day your post gets published (e.g. ‘28’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘12’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘29’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘20’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘4596’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted version of the post title. For example, if your post title is ”Ten Signs That You’re About To Get Fired From Your Job!”, the postname tag will convert this into “ten-signs-that-youre-about-to-get-fired-from-your-job” (all letters converted to lower case and no exclamation marks) in the URL. Tip: You can edit this text in the post slug field on the Add/Edit Post/Page screens.
• %category% – A sanitized version of the category name. Nested sub-categories appear as nested directories in the URI (Uniform Resource Identifier – the string of characters used in the URL). Tip: You can edit this text in the category slug field in the New/Edit Category screens.
• %author% – A sanitized version of the author name.

Note: When using multiple tags, separate each tag using a ‘/’ (forward slash), or hyphen.

For a quick setup, choose the Custom Structure option, and enter the code below into the ‘Custom Structure’ field …

Or, use one of the following structures:

Tip: If you want search engine friendly URLs for your posts, but don’t want to use a custom permalink structure using tags, then choose Common Settings > Post name instead …

Choosing ‘Post name’ is the same as adding the /%postname%/ tag in the ‘Custom Structure’ option.

Optional Permalink Settings

This section lets you set up custom structures for your category and tag archive pages.

This changes the ‘base’ category or tag of your URLs using the following structure:

• domain.com/category_base/category_name
• domain.com/tag_base/tag_name

For example, using “travel” as your category base will display your category links as ‘http://domain.com/travel/category_name/’.

So, if you add the following to your permalinks Optional > Category base settings section …

Your ‘category archives’ page URL will go from this …

To something like this …

If you leave the optional settings fields blank WordPress uses the default settings.

Remember to save your changes when you are done …

Permalinks – Useful Tips

Sometimes, when you are creating a new post and haven’t given the content a post title yet, the WordPress Autosave feature will save your draft with an assigned numerical permalink (see the example URL in the screenshot below)  …

To fix this and give the post its proper permalink, go to ‘Edit Post’ …

Click on the ‘Edit’ button in the post slug section …

Select all content in the post slug field and delete it …

Click ‘OK’ …

The post slug entry will be replaced with the correct permalink based on your post title …

Here is a quick recap of the process …

Remember to update your post to save the changes …

Your permalink should now reflect the new post title …

Note also that when you change the URL of a published post, you should also create a redirect link …

If you change your post title at a later date (e.g. you think of a more compelling post title or use a headline generator tool to help you come up with some killer post titles), remember to fix the permalink to match the new post title and add a redirection to the new post URL …

Make sure that your permalinks match the titles of your posts and pages to help site visitors find what they are looking for and ensure that search engines will better index your content …

Permalinks – Additional Information

Use Descriptive Categories

To get the optimal benefit from using Permalinks, remember to set up your WordPress Categories correctly. If you do not have any categories set up, adding a category tag to your permalink forces WordPress to use the default category (uncategorized).

According to WordPress SEO expert and author of the WordPress SEO plugin Joost de Valk, here are some points to keep in mind if you are wondering whether you should add categories to your permalink structure or not:

• If your domain is short and your category name is short and descriptive (e.g. uses a relevant keyword or keyword phrase), you may want to use the category tag in your permalink.
• If your post slug (the part of your URL that identifies your post) is too long, it can make your post URL harder to copy or share and decrease the SEO benefit.
• Do you plan to post content under only one category or multiple categories? If you are going to post content under multiple categories, then it’s recommended that you do not use the category tag in your permalink structure.

Ultimately, when it comes to category vs no category there is no perfect permalink structure to use. We recommend choosing the permalink structure you think will suit your needs best and that will make your web address short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We cover WordPress categories in another tutorial.

Avoid Using Date-Based Permalinks

Another useful tip from Joost de Valk is that unless you plan to run a news website or there is a special reason why you need to add dates to your URLs, avoid choosing date-based permalink options for your blog’s URLs.

(Avoid setting up permalinks that time-stamp your posts)

Visitors are less likely to click on a post that is several years old, even if the content is relevant to what they are searching for.

What If My Site Already Has Indexed Content?

Normally, your site’s permalinks should be configured when you install a new WordPress site. This should be part of your site planning process.

If your website is already established or your site already has a lot of posts indexed in the search engines and you want to change the permalink structure, make sure that this is absolutely necessary, as doing so could create SEO issues and errors.

301 Redirection

As you’ve seen in earlier screenshots, many WordPress site owners (or their web developers) are completely unaware of the SEO-friendly URLs feature of WordPress.

Maybe when you started out, your site used the default WordPress URL structure and now you want to optimize your site better for search engines. Maybe your site was configured to display post dates in your URLs and now all of your content is showing as being 2-3 years old and you want to remove the date portion of your URLs.

The best way to change your permalink structure without affecting your site’s SEO or rankings in a negative way is to use ‘301 redirects’ to reassign all links that were set up using the old permalink syntax to URLs using the new permalink syntax.

Search engines interpret a ’301′ code as a link that has been permanently relocated to another destination. 301 redirects are the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect visitors to new web page destinations and avoid running into ”page not found” errors if clicking on an old link.

To create an effective syntax change and avoid SEO problems, sending visitors to broken links, etc. you should set up a redirection system before messing with the permalink structure of your site.

You can WordPress site using redirection plugins like Simple 301 Redirects, or Redirection, or use the services of a professional to help you set up and redirect your permalinks correctly to avoid problems and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up link redirections using plugins or use the services of a professional)

Congratulations! Now you know about the built-in system WordPress uses to display search engine-friendly URLs for your posts and improve your search search rankings. For additional information on using Permalinks, see the WordPress codex here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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