Wouldn’t it be great if you could just publish new content on your website or blog, and the following would then happen … all from your post address:

• Potential site visitors could quickly gain an understanding of what your post was about,
• Search engines could find your pages faster,
• Each content item created on your website or blog would have its own unique ID, making your content easier to manage.

Well, this is what WordPress permalinks let you do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – Definition

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

A permalink is the URL that visitors and search engines will use to link to articles or sections of your site or the links you send in an email pointing readers to your posts. Permalinks are sometimes referred to as “pretty” URLs.

Permalinks make the URLs to each post on your website permanent, hence a permalink.

Why Use Permalinks?

As you probably know, WordPress is one of the best CMS applications you can use when it comes to publishing search optimized content.

WordPress is not only great for SEO out of the box, but there are excellent SEO plugins you can use that can help to enhance its SEO aspect.

If you are looking to optimize the SEO aspect of your site or blog, then you cannot ignore the importance of your URLs. Google places considerable weight on the URL structure of your site.

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

Now … let’s take a look at why you should configure your permalinks in WordPress.

Typically, a default WordPress installation uses a link-naming structure for your posts that isn’t search engine friendly and looks like this …

The above link structure is used by WordPress to locate information inside its database. It doesn’t really help your site with on-site SEO.

As the screenshot taken directly from Google search listings below shows, many WordPress users have not configured their sites to use WordPress permalinks …

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

To get the best possible 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 and archived posts, so your pages can go from this …

To this …

Out of the box, WordPress URLs are not very SEO-friendly. In this tutorial, you will learn how to configure your WP permalinks to display your posts with search engine-friendly URLs.

How To Configure WordPress Permalinks

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

(Change 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-deals/five-best-european-cruise-destinations

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=8303

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

Pretty Permalink Tags

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

• %year% – The year the post is published, four digits (e.g. ‘2012’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘04’)
• %day% – The day the post is published (e.g. ‘26’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘20’)
• %minute% – The minute the post gets published (e.g. ‘01’)
• %second% – The exact second your post gets published (e.g. ‘52’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘9882’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of your post title. For example, if the 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 exclamation marks removed) in the URL. Tip: You can always edit the words in your post title 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 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 tag and category pages here is where you would do this.

You can change the ‘base’ category or tag URLs using the following structure:

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

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

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

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

To this …

If you leave the fields blank the default settings 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 – Additional Info

Set Up Your Categories

To get the best SEO benefit out of 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 a few things to keep in mind if you are wondering whether or not to add categories to your permalink structure:

• If your domain is short and your category 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 share and decrease 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 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 adding category vs no category there is no ”better” permalink structure to use. Use a permalink structure you think will suit your needs best. SEO experts recommend making your web addresses short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We cover WordPress categories in other tutorials.

Make Your Content Timeless

Another useful tip from Joost de Valk is that unless you run a news website or you have a special reason to date your site’s content, avoid selecting date-based permalink options when setting up your URLs.

(Avoid using permalinks 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 what they are searching for.

What If My Site Has Lots Of Content?

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

If your website is already established or your site already has a lot of content indexed in the search engines and you want to change the permalink structure, make sure that this is really necessary, as changing permalinks after your site has already been up and running for a while could create issues and errors.

301 Redirects

As you’ve seen in the above screenshots of actual search results, many WordPress site 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 improve your site’s SEO. Maybe your website was configured to display post dates in your URLs and now all of your posts are showing as being old and you want to remove the date tags in the permalinks.

To change your URL structure without negatively affecting your site’s SEO or existing rankings you will need to use ‘301 redirections’ to point all links set up using the old permalink syntax to post URLs that use the new permalink syntax.

A code ‘301’ is interpreted by search engines as a link that has permanently relocated to another address. 301 redirection is the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect users to new site destinations and avoid ‘404’ (Page not found) errors if following an old link.

To create an effective syntax change and avoid SEO problems, sending visitors to error pages, etc. you should install and set up your redirection system before changing the permalink structure of your site.

You can site using a WP redirection plugin 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 issues 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 SEO-friendly URLs for your posts and improve your search search rankings. For additional information on using Permalinks, refer to the WordPress codex here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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