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

• New visitors could understand what your post was about,
• Search engines could easily find your post and correctly classify its content for better search rankings,
• Every piece of content published on your site 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 – Definition

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

A permalink is the URL that other people use to link to your articles or sections of your site or the links you send in emails pointing readers to a particular item of content on your site. Some people also call permalinks “pretty” URLs.

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

Permalinks – Why Use Them?

As you have probably heard by now, WordPress is one of the best Content Management Systems you can use when it comes to SEO.

WordPress is not only great for SEO out of the box, but there are SEO plugins you can install that will help to improve its SEO aspect considerably.

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

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

Now … let’s see why it’s best to set up 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 to locate information within your database. It does not help your site with on-site SEO.

As the screenshot below shows, many WordPress users are still using out-of-the-box settings when publishing their content online …

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

To get the most SEO benefit out of using WordPress and improve your site’s traffic results, you should configure 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 and archived posts, so your content can go from something that is non-SEO friendly like this …

To something like this …

By default, WordPress URLs are not very search engine-friendly. This tutorial shows you how to set up your permalinks in WordPress to get better indexing in search engines.

How To Set Up WordPress Permalinks

In your WordPress main menu, click on 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 one.

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 …

(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-europe/best-value-european-cruise-destinations

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=7230

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

SEO-Friendly 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, displayed as four digits (e.g. ‘2014’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘03’)
• %day% – The day the post gets published (e.g. ‘17’)
• %hour% – The hour your post is published (e.g. ‘08’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘31’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘04’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘4504’)
• %postname% – A sanitized 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 titles 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 adding the /%postname%/ tag in ‘Custom Structure’.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

If you need to configure custom permalinks for your category and tag archive page URLs you can do this in this section.

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

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

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

To this …

If you leave the fields blank WordPress uses the default settings.

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 Information

Categories

To get the best SEO benefit out of 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 Joost de Valk, here are a few points to consider if you are wondering whether or not to add categories to your permalink structure:

• If your category slug 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 or copy 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.

Despite being the subject of intense debate in WordPress SEO circles, when it comes to category vs no category there is no perfect permalink structure to use. Choose the permalink structure you think will suit your site best. Many 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.

Create Timeless Posts

Another tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your site is a news blog or you have a special reason to create dated post URLs, avoid using date-based permalink settings when configuring your blog’s URLs.

(Avoid using permalinks that time-stamp your posts)

Although setting up URL structures that date your content is better that using no permalinks at all from an SEO aspect, people are less likely to click on posts that are a couple of years old, even if the content is relevant to the answers they are searching for.

What About Changing Permalinks In Sites With 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 site is already established or your site already has a lot of content indexed in the search engines and you would like to change the permalink structure, make sure that this is absolutely something that needs doing, as changing permalinks after your site has been up and running for a while could create issues and errors.

301 Redirects

As you’ve seen earlier, some WordPress site owners (or whoever set up their site) are unaware of the SEO-friendly URLs feature of WordPress.

Maybe when you started, your site used the default WordPress URL structure and now you would like to improve your SEO. Perhaps your website or blog was originally set up to display post dates in your URLs and now all of your posts are perceived as being outdated and you want to remove the date tags of the permalinks.

The best way to edit your permalinks without negatively affecting your site’s SEO is to use ‘301 redirections’ to point links using the old URL syntax to links using the new permalink syntax.

Search engines interpret a code ‘301’ as a link that has permanently been relocated to another address. 301 redirection is the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect users to new website destinations and avoid ‘404’ (Page not found) errors if they click on an old link.

To effectively change your syntax and avoid damaging your rankings, sending visitors to error pages, etc. you should set up your redirection system before changing the permalink structure of your site.

You can add a link redirection system to your site or blog using WordPress redirection 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 any problems and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up URL redirections using a WordPress 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 and improve your search search rankings. For additional information on using Permalinks, refer to the WordPress codex below:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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