Wouldn’t it be great if you could publish new content on your WordPress website, and the following took place … all from your post address:

• Readers could glean what your post is about,
• Search engines would be able to easily discover your post and correctly classify its content to improve your search rankings,
• Every single post on your site would have a unique ID, making things easier to manage.

Well, with WordPress permalinks you can easily do this!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – What Are They?

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

A permalink is the web address that others will use to link to your articles or sections of your site or the links you send in an email pointing to content items on your site. Permalinks are often called “pretty” URLs.

Permalinks make the web address pointing to each post on your site permanent, hence a permalink.

Why Use Permalinks?

As you probably know, WordPress is one of the best Content Management Systems available when it comes to SEO.

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

If you are looking to optimize the SEO aspect of your website, then you cannot ignore the importance of your URLs. Search engines like Google tend to give special consideration to the structure of your site’s URLs when indexing site pages.

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

Now … let’s take a look at why you may need to set up permalinks in WordPress.

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

The link structure shown above is used by WordPress to locate information inside your database. It doesn’t really mean anything to either search engines or visitors, and it doesn’t help your site with on-site search engine optimization.

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

Although these sites are getting their content indexed on search engines, these site owners are missing out on additional SEO benefits.

To get the most SEO benefit from using WordPress and improve your site’s rankings, you should configure 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 something like this …

In this tutorial, you will learn how to set up your WordPress permalinks to display your posts using search engine-friendly URLs instead of the default URL structure and help every new post you publish get better indexing in Google.

How To Configure WordPress Permalinks

From your WordPress main menu, select Settings > Permalinks …

This brings up 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 need to specify a different Permalink structure than the default one.

Permalinks > Common Settings

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

(Configure your permalink settings to create SEO-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/three-best-european-river-cruises

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=625

(Using permalinks helps search engines and readers understand what your page is about)

Pretty URL Tags

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

• %year% – The year the post gets published, displayed as four digits (e.g. ‘2014’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘02’)
• %day% – The day your post is published (e.g. ‘15’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘17’)
• %minute% – The minute your post is published (e.g. ‘43’)
• %second% – The exact second the post gets published (e.g. ‘51’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘9154’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted version of your 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 characters converted to lower case and punctuation marks removed) in the URL. Tip: You can edit this text 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 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 choosing the ‘Custom Structure’ option and adding the /%postname%/ tag.

Optional Permalink Settings

Here you can set up custom structures for your category and tag URLs.

You can change the ‘base’ tag or category of your URLs using the following syntax:

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

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

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

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

To something like this …

If you leave these fields blank the default settings will be used.

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 – Tips

Use Short, Descriptive Categories

To get the best possible SEO 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 some points to consider if you are wondering whether or not to add categories to your permalinks:

• If your domain is short and your category name is short and descriptive (e.g. adds a relevant keyword or keyword phrase to your URL), you may want to add categories 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.

Despite being the subject of intense debate in WordPress SEO circles, when it comes to category vs no category there really is no ”better” permalink structure to use. Use a permalink structure you think will suit your needs best. Your web address should be short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We cover WordPress categories in another article.

Avoid Setting Up Permalinks That Time-Stamp Your Posts

Another great tip from Joost de Valk is that unless you run a news site or you have any special reason to add dates to your URLs, avoid choosing date-based permalink options when setting up your site’s URLs.

(Avoid setting up URL structures that time-stamp your content)

Although setting up URL structures that time-stamp your content is better that using no permalinks at all from an SEO perspective, visitors are less likely to click on a post that is several years old, even if the content is relevant to the answers they are searching for.

What If My Blog Already Has Content?

Normally, your permalinks should be configured when you perform a new WordPress installation. This should be part of your website planning process.

If your website is already established or your site already has many posts indexed in the search engines and you want to change the permalink structure, make sure that this is something that absolutely needs doing, as doing so can create issues and loss of traffic.

301 Redirects

As you’ve seen in the above screenshots of actual search results, some WordPress site owners (or whoever set up their site) seem to be completely unaware of the permalinks feature of WordPress.

Maybe you started out using the default WordPress URL structure and now you would like to optimize your site better for search engines. Perhaps your website was configured to display post dates in your web address and now all of your content is perceived as being out-of-date and you want to remove the date portion of the permalinks.

To edit your permalink structure without negatively affecting your site’s SEO you will need to use ‘301 redirects’ to point all links set up using the old permalink syntax to page URLs using the new structure.

A ’301′ code is interpreted by search engines 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 ‘404’ (Page not found) errors when they click on an old link.

To effectively change your syntax and avoid damaging your search rankings, sending visitors to broken links, etc. you will need to add a redirection system before changing the permalink structure of your site.

You can add a link redirection system to your do this using a WordPress redirection plugin like Simple 301 Redirects, or Redirection, or get a professional to help you set up and redirect your permalinks correctly to avoid issues and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up 301 redirects 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 results. For additional information on using Permalinks, see the official WordPress documentation here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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