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

• Potential visitors to your site could quickly understand what the content is about,
• Search engines could discover your pages faster,
• Every content item on your website would have its own unique ID, making your site easier to manage.

Well, this is what WordPress permalinks let you do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – What Are They?

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

A permalink is the URL that others use to link to your posts or sections of your site or the links you send in emails pointing readers to content items on your site. Some people refer to permalinks as “pretty” URLs.

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

Permalinks – Why Do We Need To Use Them?

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

WordPress is not only great for SEO out of the box, but the SEO aspect can be considerably finetuned with 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. Google places considerable weight on the structure of your site’s URLs when indexing its site pages.

Permalinks are used to turn 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 see the reason why you should configure your permalinks if publishing content in WordPress.

By default, a 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 information inside your database. It doesn’t really help your site with on-site search engine optimization.

As the screenshot image below shows, many WordPress site owners haven’t configured their sites to use WordPress permalinks …

Although these sites are still getting their content indexed on search engines, the owners of these sites are missing out on extra SEO benefits.

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

WordPress lets you 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 configure your WordPress permalinks to display your posts using SEO-friendly URLs instead of the out-of-the-box linking structure and help every new post you add to your site get better indexing results in Google.

How To Set Up WordPress Permalinks

Log into your WP admin and 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 search engine friendly URLs 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 search engine-friendly URLs …

(Set up 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-tips/top-european-river-cruises

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=2681

(Using permalinks helps visitors and search engines understand what the content is about)

Permalink 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 is published, displayed as four digits (e.g. ‘2011’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘01’)
• %day% – The day your post is published (e.g. ‘11’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘14’)
• %minute% – The minute your post gets published (e.g. ‘27’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘04’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘9180’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted version of your post title. For example, if your post title is ”It Ain’t Worth Doin’ No More!”, the postname tag will convert this into “it-aint-worth-doin-no-more” (all letters converted to lower case and no exclamation marks) in the URL. Tip: You can edit the wording in your post titles 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.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

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

This changes the ‘base’ tag or category 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 will make your category links display as ‘http://domain.com/travel/uncategorized/’.

So, if you make the following change 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 – Additional Notes

Use Descriptive Categories

To get the optimal 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 plugin developer Joost de Valk, here are a few points to consider if you are wondering whether you should add categories to your permalinks or not:

• 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 share or copy and reduce the SEO benefit.
• If you plan 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 provide more information about WordPress categories in other tutorials.

Create Timeless Posts

Another great tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your goal is to run a news blog or there is a special reason why you need to create dated web URLs, avoid selecting date-based permalink settings when setting up your blog’s URLs.

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

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

Changing Permalinks In Site With Indexed Posts

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

If your website or blog 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 really necessary, as doing so can create SEO issues and errors.

301 Redirection

As you’ve seen earlier, some website owners (or their web developers) seem to be unaware of the permalinks feature of WordPress.

Maybe you started out using the default WordPress permalinks 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 URLs and now all of your content is showing as being 2-3 years old and you want to remove the date portion in your URLs.

The best way to modify your permalink structure without negatively affecting your site’s SEO or existing rankings is to use ‘301 redirections’ to reassign links using the old URL structure to web URLs that use the new permalinks structure.

A ’301′ code is interpreted by search engines as a link that has been permanently moved to another location. 301 redirects are the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect users to new website destinations and avoid ”page not found” errors when following an old link.

To effectively change your permalink syntax and avoid damaging your search rankings, sending visitors to broken links, etc. you should install and set up a redirection system before messing with the permalink structure of your site.

You can site or blog using WordPress plugins like Simple 301 Redirects, or Redirection, or get a professional to assist you with setting up and redirecting your permalinks correctly to avoid any issues and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up link redirections using a WordPress plugin or get professional assistance)

Congratulations! Now you know how to configure your blog to display search engine-friendly URLs for your posts. For additional information on using Permalinks, see the official WordPress documentation here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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