Wouldn’t it be great if after publishing a new post on your WordPress website, the following could take place … all from your page URL:

• Potential site visitors could determine what your page was about,
• Google would be able to find your pages faster,
• Every piece of content created on your website would have its own unique identifier, making things easier to manage.

Well, with permalinks you can!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

What Are Permalinks?

Permalinks are the permanent URLs to your individual posts, categories and other taxonomies (a way to organize things together) like archives.

A permalink is the web address that others use to link to your posts or sections of your site or the links you send in emails pointing to content items on your blog. Some people also call permalinks “pretty” URLs.

Permalinks make the URL pointing to each post on your website permanent, hence a perma-link.

Why Do You Need To Use Permalinks?

As you probably know, 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 the SEO aspect can be easily enhanced using excellent SEO plugins.

If you focus on the SEO aspect of your site or blog, then you should not ignore the importance of its URLs. Search engines like Google tend to give special significance to the structure of URLs when indexing its content.

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

Now … let’s review the reason why it’s best to use permalinks in WordPress.

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

The above link structure is used by WordPress to locate data within its database. It doesn’t really help your site with on-site SEO.

As you can see from the screenshot below, many WordPress users are still using out-of-the-box settings when publishing their content …

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

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

WordPress offers the ability to create a custom URL structure for your published posts, so your content can easily go from this …

To this …

Out of the box, WordPress post URLs are not very SEO-friendly. This tutorial shows you how to set up your permalinks in WordPress to help your content rank better in Google.

How To Configure WordPress Permalinks

In your WordPress dashboard section select, 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 “pretty” permalinks instead for our posts. To do this, we need to specify a different Permalink structure than the default.

Common Permalink 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/budget-cruises/romantic-cruise-holiday-bargains

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=534

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

How To Use Permalink Tags

“Pretty” permalinks, or SEO-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. ‘2011’)
• %monthnum% – The month your post gets published (e.g. ‘08’)
• %day% – The day the post is published (e.g. ‘21’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘02’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘60’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘15’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘4865’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted version of your 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 letters converted to lower case and no exclamation symbols) in the URL. Tip: You can always edit the words in your post title in the post slug field on the Add/Edit Post/Page screens.
• %category% – A correctly formatted 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 correctly formatted 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

If you need to set up custom permalinks for your category and tag archive pages here is where you would do this.

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

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

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

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

Your ‘category archives’ page URL will change from looking like this …

To something like this …

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

Remember to save any 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 – Additional Information

Categories

To get the greatest benefit from using Permalinks, remember to set up your WordPress Categories correctly. If you do not have any categories set up, WordPress will use the default category (uncategorized).

According to WordPress SEO plugin developer Joost de Valk, here are a few points to keep in mind if you are wondering whether you should add categories to your permalink structure or not:

• If your category name is short and descriptive (e.g. adds a relevant keyword or keyword phrase to your URL), you may want to use categories 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 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 we recommend not using the category tag in your permalink structure.

Despite being the subject of intense debate in WordPress SEO circles, when it comes to category vs no category there really is no ideal permalink structure to use. We recommend choosing the permalink structure you think will suit your site best and that will make your post URLs short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We provide detailed information about WordPress categories in another tutorial.

Create Timeless Posts

Another great tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your goal is to run a news website or you have any special reason to create dated website addresses, it’s best to avoid choosing date-based permalink syntax when setting up your URLs.

(Avoid using permalinks that time-stamp your content)

Although setting up permalinks that time-stamp 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 if it is a couple of years old, even if the content is relevant to the answers they are searching for.

What If My Site Has Lots Of Indexed Content?

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

If your website is already established or you have a lot of content already indexed in the search engines and you want to change the permalink structure, make sure that this is really necessary, as making changes to permalinks after your site has already been up and running for a while could create SEO issues and errors.

301 Redirection

As you’ve seen earlier, many site owners (or whoever set up their site) are unaware of the permalinks feature of WordPress.

Maybe when you started, your site used the default WordPress URL structure and now you want to optimize your site better for search engines. Maybe your site was originally set up to display post dates in your web address and now all of your content is showing as being old and you want to delete the date tags of the URLs.

The best way to change your URL structure without negatively affecting your site’s SEO or existing rankings is to use ‘301 redirections’ to point all links that were set up using the old URL structure to web addresses using the new syntax.

A ’301′ code is interpreted by search engines as a link that has permanently relocated to another destination. 301 redirection is the most efficient and search engine friendly way to redirect users to new web page destinations and avoid running into page errors if clicking on an old link.

To create an effective syntax change and avoid damaging your search rankings, sending visitors to error pages, etc. you will need to add your redirection system before messing with the permalink structure of your site.

You can site or blog using WP redirection plugins like Simple 301 Redirects, or Redirection, or get 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 get professional help)

Congratulations! Now you know about the built-in system WordPress uses to display search engine-friendly URLs for your posts. To learn more about using Permalinks, refer to the official WordPress documentation here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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