Wouldn’t it be great if you could simply add content to your WordPress site, and the following would then happen … just from your page address:

• Potential visitors could quickly understand what your page is about,
• Search engines could find your posts faster,
• Every single post you create on your website would have its own unique identifier, making things easier to manage.

Well, with permalinks this can easily be done!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – Definition

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

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

Permalinks make the URL pointing to each post on your blog permanent, hence a permalink.

Why Use Permalinks?

As you have probably heard by now, WordPress is one of the best CMS tools you can use when it comes to publishing search optimized content.

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

If you are looking to optimize the SEO aspect of your website, then you cannot ignore the importance of your URLs. Google places considerable weight on the structure of a site’s URLs when indexing its site pages.

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

Now … let’s take a look at the reason why you may need to use permalinks in WordPress.

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

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

As you can see from the image below taken directly from Google search listings, many site owners haven’t yet set up their permalinks to publish search optimized content …

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

To get greater SEO benefit from using WordPress and improve your site’s traffic results, you should 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 pages can go from something that is non-SEO friendly like this …

To this …

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

Changing Your WordPress Permalinks

In your WordPress admin select, Settings > Permalinks …

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

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 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-tips/how-to-save-money-on-cruise-travel

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=34

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

Pretty Permalink Tags

“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, four digits (e.g. ‘2011’)
• %monthnum% – The month the post is published (e.g. ‘06’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘19’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘22’)
• %minute% – The minute your post is published (e.g. ‘48’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘55’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘8669’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted version of your post title. For example, if the post title is ”Ten Best Hotels In Cote D’Azur!”, the postname tag will convert this into “ten-best-hotels-in-cote-dazur” (all lower case characters and exclamation 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 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 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’ setting.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

This section lets you configure custom structures for your tag and category page URLs.

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

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

For example, changing your category base to “recipes” would make your category links display as ‘http://domain.com/recipes/uncategorized/’.

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

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

To this …

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

Remember to save any changes when 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 Descriptive Categories

To get greater 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 a few things 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. 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 share or copy 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 ideal permalink structure to use. Use a permalink structure you think will suit your needs best. Your post URLs should be short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We cover WordPress categories in other articles.

Avoid Using Time-Specific URLs

Another useful tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your aim is to run a news website or you have a special reason to date your content, it’s best to avoid using date-based permalink options when configuring your URLs.

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

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 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 website or blog is already established or your site already has a lot of content indexed in the search engines and you would like to change the permalink structure, make sure that this is really necessary, as doing so can create SEO issues and errors.

301 Redirection

As you’ve seen in the above screenshots of actual search results, some WordPress users (or their web developers) seem to be unaware of the permalinks feature of WordPress.

Maybe when you started, your site used the default WordPress permalinks and now you would like to improve your SEO. Perhaps your site was originally set up to display post dates in your web address and now all of your posts are perceived as being outdated and you want to delete the date tags in the permalinks.

The best way to change your permalink structure without affecting your site’s SEO or rankings in a negative way is to add ‘301 redirections’ to reassign links using the old URL syntax to web addresses using the new structure.

A code ‘301’ is interpreted by search engines as a link that has permanently relocated to another destination. 301 redirects are the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect visitors to new site destinations and avoid ”page not found” errors if following an old link.

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

You can add a link redirection system to your do this 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 problems and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up 301 redirects using plugins or get professional assistance)

Congratulations! Now you know how to change your site to display search engine-friendly URLs for your posts. To learn more about using Permalinks, see the official WordPress documentation here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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