Wouldn’t it be great if you could add new content to your website, and the following would then take place … all from your post address:

• Visitors could easily determine what the page was about,
• Search engines would find your pages faster,
• Every single post on your website 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

What Is A Permalink?

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 will use to link to your posts or sections of your site or the links you send in an email pointing readers to articles on your site. Some people also call permalinks “pretty” URLs.

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

Why Do You Need To Use Permalinks?

As you have probably heard by now, WordPress is one of the best Content Management Systems available when it comes to publishing search optimized content.

WordPress is not only well optimized straight out of the box, but there are SEO plugins you can use that will help to fine tuned its SEO aspect considerably.

If you focus on the SEO aspect of your website, then you cannot ignore the importance of its site’s URLs. Search engines like Google tend to pay special attention to the structure of URLs when indexing content.

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

Now … let’s see the reason why it’s best to use permalinks if publishing content in WordPress.

By default, a WordPress installation uses a URL structure for your posts that isn’t very search engine friendly and looks like this …

WordPress uses the above link structure to find data inside its database. It does not mean much to anyone, and it doesn’t help your website with on-site search engine optimization.

As you can see from the screenshot image below taken from Google search results, many WordPress users have not configured their permalinks to publish search optimized content …

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

To get greater SEO benefit out of using WordPress and improve your site’s rankings, 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 numbers and symbols.

WordPress allows you to create a custom URL structure for your published and archived posts, so your content can easily go from this …

To something with an SEO-friendly URL like this …

Out of the box, WordPress URLs are not very SEO-friendly. This step-by-step tutorial shows you how to configure the Permalinks section of your WordPress site to automatically get better indexing in search engines.

Setting Up Your WordPress Permalinks

From your WP administration menu, click on 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 search engine friendly URL instead for our posts. To do this, we will 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 …

(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/europe-travel/cruise-holiday-deals

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=7776

(Using permalinks helps search engines and readers understand what the post 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 of the post, four digits (e.g. ‘2010’)
• %monthnum% – The month your post is published (e.g. ‘07’)
• %day% – The day the post gets published (e.g. ‘26’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘18’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘34’)
• %second% – The exact second your post gets published (e.g. ‘29’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘19’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of the 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 lower case characters and removed punctuation symbols) in the URL. Tip: You can always 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’ option.

Optional Permalink Settings

If you need to configure custom permalinks for your category and tag page URLs here is where you would do this.

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, 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 go from this …

To this …

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

Remember to save your changes after 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 more benefit out of using Permalinks, you will need 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 expert Joost de Valk, here are some points to consider if you are wondering whether you should add categories to your permalinks or not:

• If your category name is short and descriptive (e.g. uses a relevant keyword or keyword phrase), you may want to use the category tag 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 copy or share and reduce 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.

Ultimately, when it comes to category vs no category there 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 cover WordPress categories in another article.

Create Timeless Posts

Another useful tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your site is a news blog or you have any special reason to create dated web addresses, it’s best to avoid choosing date-based permalink settings when setting up your site’s URLs.

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

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

Changing The Permalink Structure In An Established Site

Normally, your site’s permalinks should be configured when you install a new WordPress site. This should be part of your website planning process.

If your website or blog has been running for a while or your site already has many posts indexed in the search engines and you would like to change the permalink structure, make sure that this is something that absolutely needs doing, as changing permalinks after your site has been going for a while could create SEO issues and errors.

301 Redirects

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 search-friendly URLs feature of WordPress.

Maybe you started out using the default WordPress permalinks and now you want to improve your SEO. Maybe your website was configured to display post dates in your web address and now all of your content is showing as being 2-3 years old and you want to remove the date tags in your URLs.

To edit your permalink structure without negatively affecting your site’s SEO or rankings you should add ‘301 redirections’ to point all links using the old permalinks syntax to URLs that use the new permalinks structure.

A ’301′ code is interpreted by search engines as a link that has permanently been moved to another destination. 301 redirection is the most efficient and search engine friendly way to redirect visitors to new web page destinations and avoid running into ”page not found” errors if following an old link.

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

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

(Set up link redirections using a WP redirection plugin 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 below:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

***