Wouldn’t it be great if after adding a new post to your WordPress site, the following took place … all from your post address:

• Potential visitors to your site could glean what the content was about,
• Google would be able to easily discover your pages and correctly classify their content for better search rankings,
• Every content item created on your website would have a unique ID, making things easier to manage.

Well, this is what a WordPress permalink lets you do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

What Is A Permalink?

A permalink is the permanent URL to your individual WordPress posts, categories and other taxonomies (a way to group things together) like archives.

A permalink is the URL that visitors and search engines use to link to your posts or sections of your site or the links you send in an email pointing readers to content items on your website. Some people also call permalinks “pretty” URLs.

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

Why Use Permalinks?

As you are probably aware, WordPress is one of the best CMS applications you can use when it comes to SEO.

WordPress is not only great for SEO out of the box, but its SEO aspect can be easily finetuned using SEO plugins.

If you focus on the SEO aspect of your website, then you should not ignore the importance of your site’s URLs. Google tends to pay special attention to the URL structure of a site.

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

Now … let’s turn our attention to the reason why you should use permalinks if publishing content in WordPress.

Typically, a default WordPress installation uses a non-search engine friendly URL structure for your posts that looks like this …

The link structure shown above is used by WordPress to locate data within its database. It does not mean much to anyone, and it doesn’t help your website with on-site SEO.

As you can see from the screenshot image below, many site owners are still using out-of-the-box permalink settings when publishing their content …

Although Google is still indexing the above sites, they are missing out on additional SEO benefits.

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

WordPress allows you to create a custom URL structure for your published posts, so your pages can easily go from this …

To something with an SEO-friendly URL like this …

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

How To Change Your WordPress Permalinks

In your WordPress dashboard click on, Settings > Permalinks …

This will bring 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 search engine friendly URLs instead for our posts. To do this, we will need to specify a different Permalink structure than the default one.

Common Settings – Permalinks

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

(Set up 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/travel-europe/romantic-cruise-holiday-bargains

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=6349

(Using post name permalinks helps readers understand what the content is about)

Creating SEO-Friendly Tags In WordPress

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

• %year% – The year of the post, displayed as four digits (e.g. ‘2014’)
• %monthnum% – The month the post gets published (e.g. ‘10’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘02’)
• %hour% – The hour your post is published (e.g. ‘17’)
• %minute% – The minute your post is published (e.g. ‘54’)
• %second% – The exact second your post gets published (e.g. ‘33’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘7815’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of the post title. For example, if your post title is ”The Five Don’ts Of DIY Home Repair!”, the postname tag will convert this into “the-five-donts-of-diy-home-repair” (all lower case letters and no exclamation symbols) in the URL. Tip: You can edit the URL wording 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 selecting the ‘Custom Structure’ option and adding the /%postname%/ tag.

Optional Permalink Settings

If you need to set up custom permalinks for your category and tag URLs you can do this in this section.

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

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

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

So, if you enter the following in your permalinks Optional > Category base settings field …

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

To something like this …

If you leave the optional settings fields blank the defaults will be used.

Remember to save your changes when you have finished …

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 – Tips

Use Short, Descriptive Categories

To get the best possible SEO benefit out of 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 things to consider if you are wondering whether or not to add categories to your permalink structure:

• If your domain is short and your category slug is short and descriptive (e.g. adds a relevant keyword or keyword phrase to your URL), you may want to add the category tag to 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.
• 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 really is no ”better” permalink structure to use. Use the permalink structure you think will suit your needs best. Many SEO experts and webmasters recommend making your post URLs short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We cover WordPress categories in other articles.

Don’t Use Date Permalinks

Another useful tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your aim is to run a news website or there is a special reason why you need to create dated post addresses, avoid using date-based permalinks when configuring your site’s URLs.

(Avoid setting up URL structures that date your content)

Although setting up permalinks that date your posts may be considered better that using no permalinks at all from an SEO point-of-view, visitors are less likely to click on a post that is a couple of years old, even if the content is relevant to what they are searching for.

What About Changing Permalinks In An Established Blog?

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

If your site is already established or you have a lot of content already indexed in the search engines and you would like to change the permalink structure, make sure that this is something that absolutely needs doing, as doing so could create issues and errors.

301 Redirects

As you’ve seen in the above screenshots of actual search results, many site owners (or their web developers) are unaware of the permalinks feature of WordPress.

Maybe you started out using the default WordPress permalinks and now you want to improve your SEO. Perhaps your site was configured to display post dates in your URLs and now all of your posts are showing as being 2-3 years old and you want to remove the date tags of your URLs.

The best way to change your permalinks without impacting your site’s SEO in a negative way is to use ‘301 redirections’ to reassign all links that use the previous permalink structure to post URLs that use the new syntax.

A ’301′ code is interpreted by search engines as a link that has been permanently moved to another location. 301 redirection is the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect users to new website destinations and avoid running into page errors when following an old link.

To create an effective syntax change and avoid SEO problems, sending visitors to error pages, etc. you will need to install and set up your redirection system before changing the permalink structure of your site.

You can WP site using a plugin like Simple 301 Redirects, or Redirection, or get a professional to help you set up and redirect your permalinks correctly to avoid any issues and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up 301 redirects using a WP redirection plugin or get professional assistance)

Congratulations! Now you know about the built-in system WordPress uses to display SEO-friendly URLs for your posts. For additional information on using Permalinks, refer to the WordPress codex here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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