Wouldn’t it be great if you could just add a new post to your website or blog, and the following happened … all from your URL:

• Site visitors could quickly glean what the page is about,
• Search engines would be able to find your pages faster,
• Every single post created on your website or blog would have its own unique ID, making things easier to manage.

Well, with WordPress permalinks you can easily do this!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – Definition

A permalink is the permanent URL to an individual WordPress post, category, or other taxonomy (a way to group things together) like archives.

A permalink is the URL that other people use to link to articles or sections of your site or the links you send in an email pointing readers to content items on your website. Some people also refer to permalinks as “pretty” URLs.

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

Why Do You Need To Use Permalinks?

Hopefully, you probably know by now that, 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 SEO plugins you can install that can further help to fine tuned its SEO aspect.

If you are looking to optimize the SEO aspect of your site, then you should not ignore the importance of your URLs. Google tends to pay special attention to the URL structure of a site.

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

Now … let’s turn our attention to the reason why it’s best to set up permalinks if publishing content in WordPress.

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

WordPress uses the link structure shown above to find information within its database. It does not mean anything to search engines or visitors, and it doesn’t help your website with on-site SEO.

As the screenshot image taken from Google search listings below shows, many site owners have not set up their permalinks to publish search optimized content …

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

To get the maximum SEO benefit from using 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 you the ability to create a custom URL structure for your published and archived posts, so your pages can easily 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 SEO-friendly. In this tutorial, you will learn how to configure the Permalinks section of your WordPress site to automatically get better indexing in Google.

Changing WordPress Permalinks

Log into your WP administration section and select 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 – Permalinks

In the Common Settings section, select Custom Structure, then add one or more ‘tags’ (see below) to create SEO-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/romantic-cruise-holiday-bargains

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=6728

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

How To Use Permalink Tags

“Pretty” URLs, or SEO-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% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘06’)
• %day% – The day the post is published (e.g. ‘27’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘13’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘12’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘48’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘4858’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted version of the post title. For example, if the post title is ”Ten Best Hotels In Cote D’Azur!”, the postname tag will convert this into “ten-best-hotels-in-cote-dazur” (all letters converted to lower case and removed exclamation symbols) in the URL. Tip: You can edit this wording 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

This section lets you set up custom structures for your category and tag archive pages.

This changes the ‘base’ category or tag of your URLs using the following structure:

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

For example, changing your category base to “topics” will display your category links as ‘http://domain.com/topics/uncategorized/’.

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

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 your changes when 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 – Tips

Categories

To get the greatest 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 Joost de Valk, here are a few things to keep in mind if you are wondering whether you should add categories to your permalinks or not:

• If your domain is short and your category name 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 and reduce 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 we recommend not using the category tag in your permalink structure.

Despite being the subject of intense debate in WordPress SEO circles, when it comes to using category vs no category there really is no ideal permalink structure to use. Use a permalink structure you think will suit your site best. Your post URLs should be short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We cover WordPress categories in another tutorial.

Create Timeless Posts

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

(Avoid using permalinks that date your posts)

Although using permalinks that date your content is better that using no permalinks at all from an SEO point-of-view, 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.

What About Changing Permalinks In An Established Site?

Normally, your permalinks should be set up when you create a new WordPress site. This should be part of your website planning process.

If your site has been running for a while 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 absolutely necessary, as doing so could create SEO issues and loss of traffic.

Add 301 Redirection

As you’ve seen earlier, many WordPress users (or whoever set up their site) 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. Perhaps your website or blog was configured to display post dates in your URLs and now all of your content is perceived as being outdated and you want to delete the date tags of the permalinks.

To modify your URL structure without impacting your site’s SEO or existing rankings in a negative way you should add ‘301 redirects’ to reassign links using the previous permalinks syntax to destinations that use the new permalinks structure.

Search engines interpret a code ‘301’ as a link that has permanently moved to another destination. 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 they click on an old link.

To effectively change your permalink syntax and avoid SEO problems, sending visitors to broken links, etc. you will need to configure your redirection system before changing 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 link redirections using a WP redirection plugin or get professional help)

Congratulations! Now you know about the built-in system WordPress uses to display search engine-friendly URLs for your posts. For additional information on using Permalinks, refer to the official WordPress documentation below:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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