Wouldn’t it be great if you could just add content to your WordPress website or blog, and the following took place … all from your page address:

• Potential visitors could quickly understand what your page is about,
• Search engines could find your posts faster,
• Every post added to your website or blog would have a unique identifier, making your content easier to manage.

Well, this is what permalinks let you do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – Definition

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 URL that people and search engines use to link to articles or sections of your site or the links you send in an email pointing to your posts. Some people also call permalinks “pretty” URLs.

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

Why Do You Need To Use Permalinks?

Hopefully, by now you probably know that, WordPress is one of the best CMS tools available 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 fine tuned using SEO plugins.

If you focus on the SEO aspect of your website, then you should not ignore the importance of your URLs. Search engines like Google place considerable weight on the URL structure of your site.

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

Now … let’s turn our attention to why you may need to configure your permalinks when publishing content in WordPress.

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

WordPress uses the above link structure with a string query to find data inside its database. It does not help your site with on-site SEO.

As the screenshot taken directly from Google search listings below shows, many WordPress users haven’t yet set up their sites to use WordPress permalinks …

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

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

WordPress lets you create a custom URL structure for your published and archived posts, so your content can go from something that is non-SEO friendly like this …

To something like this …

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

Setting Up Your WordPress Permalinks

From your WP dashboard menu, select 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 a “pretty” permalink instead for our posts. To do this, we will need to specify a different Permalink structure than the default.

Common Settings

In the Common Settings section, select Custom Structure, then add one or more ‘tags’ (see below) to create search engine-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/europe-travel/best-value-european-cruise-destinations

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=1550

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

Pretty URL Tags

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

• %year% – The year your post is published, four digits (e.g. ‘2014’)
• %monthnum% – The month the post is published (e.g. ‘01’)
• %day% – The day your post gets published (e.g. ‘07’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘06’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘05’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘10’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘8958’)
• %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 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 selecting ‘Custom Structure’ and using the /%postname%/ tag.

Optional Permalink Settings

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

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

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

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

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 optional settings fields blank WordPress uses the default settings.

Remember to save any changes after 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 Info

Use Short, Descriptive Categories

To get more benefit from using Permalinks, you will need 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 points to consider 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. uses a relevant keyword or keyword phrase), 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 share and decrease the SEO benefit.
• Do you plan to post content under only one category or multiple categories? 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 adding category vs no category there is no ideal permalink structure to use. Use a permalink structure that 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 other articles.

Don’t Use Date Permalinks

Another useful tip from Joost de Valk is that unless you run a news site or there is a special reason why you need to create dated post addresses, avoid choosing date-based permalink settings when setting up your URLs.

(Avoid using URL structures that date your content)

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

What If My Blog Has Published Content?

Normally, it’s best to set up your permalinks when you first install WordPress. This should be part of your website planning process.

If your website has been running for a while 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 something that absolutely needs doing, as making changes to permalinks after your site has been going for a while can create issues and errors.

Use 301 Redirects

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

Maybe when you started, your site used the default WordPress permalinks and now you want to optimize your site better for search engines. Maybe your website or blog was configured to display post dates in your URLs and now all of your posts are showing as being two or three years old and you want to remove the date portion in your permalinks.

The best way to change your URL structure without impacting your site’s SEO or existing rankings in a negative way is to add ‘301 redirects’ to point links that use the old URL syntax to web URLs using the new permalink syntax.

A code ‘301’ is interpreted by search engines as a link that has been permanently moved elsewhere. 301 redirects are the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect users to new site destinations and avoid ‘404’ (Page not found) errors if clicking on an old link.

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

You can WP site or blog using plugins like Simple 301 Redirects, or Redirection, or use the services of a professional to help you set up and redirect your permalinks correctly to avoid problems and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up URL redirections using redirection 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. To learn more about using Permalinks, refer to the official WordPress documentation below:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

***