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

• Visitors could quickly tell what the content is about,
• Google would easily find your post and correctly classify your content for better search rankings,
• Every single content item added to your website would have a unique identifier, 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?

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 web address that others will use to link to articles or sections of your site or the links you send in emails pointing readers to a particular item of content on your website. Permalinks are often called “pretty” URLs.

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

Permalinks – Why Use Them?

Hopefully, you probably know by now that, WordPress is one of the best CMS applications available when it comes to publishing search engines optimized content.

WordPress is not only well optimized right out of the box, but the SEO aspect can be considerably finetuned with SEO plugins.

If you are looking to optimize the SEO aspect of your site, then you should not ignore the importance of its URLs. Search engines like Google tend to give special consideration to the structure of a site’s URLs when indexing pages.

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 review why it’s best to configure your permalinks in WordPress.

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

WordPress uses the above link structure with a string query to find information within its database. It does not help your site with on-site search engine optimization.

As you can see from the screenshot image below taken directly from Google search results, many site owners haven’t yet configured their sites to use WordPress permalinks …

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

To get optimal 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 characters.

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

To something with an SEO-friendly URL like this …

By default, WordPress URLs are not very search engine-friendly. This tutorial shows you how to set up your WordPress permalinks to display posts with SEO-friendly URLs.

Configuring WordPress Permalinks

In your WordPress administration section click on, Settings > Permalinks …

This brings 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 one set by default.

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 …

(Configure 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-europe/how-to-save-money-on-cruise-travel

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=7063

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

Creating Pretty WordPress URLs

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

• %year% – The year the post gets published, four digits (e.g. ‘2011’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘03’)
• %day% – The day the post gets published (e.g. ‘23’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘16’)
• %minute% – The minute your post is published (e.g. ‘09’)
• %second% – The exact second your post is published (e.g. ‘03’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘1593’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted version of your 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 exclamation symbols deleted) in the URL. Tip: You can always edit the wording in your post title 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.

Optional Permalink Settings

If you need to set up custom permalinks for your tag and category page URLs 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 “travel” as your category base would make your category links display as ‘http://domain.com/travel/uncategorized/’.

So, if you enter the following in your permalinks Optional > Category base settings field …

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

To this …

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

Remember to save any 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 Information

Categories

To get the most SEO benefit from using Permalinks, it’s important 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 and author of the WordPress SEO plugin Joost de Valk, here are some things to consider if you are wondering whether or not to add categories to your permalinks:

• If your category is short and descriptive (e.g. adds a relevant keyword or keyword phrase to your URL), you may want to use categories 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 or copy and reduce 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.

Despite being the subject of intense debate in WordPress SEO circles, when it comes to category vs no category there really 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 provide detailed information about WordPress categories in other tutorials.

Avoid Using Time-Stamping URLs

Another tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your site is a news site or you have a special reason to date your content, it’s best to avoid choosing date-based permalinks when configuring your blog’s URLs.

(Avoid using URL structures that date your posts)

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

Changing The Permalink Structure In An Established Site

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

If your site is already established or your site already has many posts indexed in the search engines and you want to change the permalink structure, make sure that this is something that absolutely needs doing, as doing so can create SEO issues and loss of traffic.

Add 301 Redirects

As you’ve seen earlier, many site owners (or their web developers) are completely unaware of the SEO-friendly URLs feature of WordPress.

Maybe you started out using the default WordPress URL structure and now you would like to improve your site’s SEO. Perhaps your site 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 portion of your permalinks.

The best way to modify your URL structure without affecting your site’s SEO or rankings in a negative way is to add ‘301 redirects’ to reassign links using the previous permalinks structure to links that use the new structure.

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

To effectively change your permalink syntax and avoid SEO problems, sending visitors to error pages, 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 redirection plugins like Simple 301 Redirects, or Redirection, or get a professional to help you set up and redirect your permalinks correctly to avoid problems and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up 301 redirections using plugins or get professional help)

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

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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