Wouldn’t it be great if you could publish content on your WordPress website or blog, and the following took place … just from your URL:

• Potential visitors could easily glean what the post was about,
• Search engines would be able to easily discover your pages and correctly index their content for better search results,
• Every post you create on your website would have its own unique identifier, making your site easier to manage.

Well, with WordPress permalinks you can!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – Definition

Permalinks are the permanent URLs to your individual WordPress posts, categories and other taxonomies (a way to group things together) like archives.

A permalink is the web address that others use to link to your posts or sections of your site or the links you send in an email pointing readers to your posts. Some people also call permalinks “pretty” URLs.

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

Permalinks – Why Use Them?

Hopefully, you are probably aware by now that, WordPress is one of the best CMS applications 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 can help to fine tuned its SEO aspect further.

If you focus on the SEO aspect of your site or blog, then you should not ignore the importance of your site’s URLs. Search engines like Google tend to pay special attention to the structure of a site’s URLs when indexing its pages.

Permalinks are used to make the links on your site into memorable 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 you may need to configure your permalinks when publishing content in WordPress.

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

The above link structure is used by WordPress to find data inside your database. It does not help your site with on-site search engine optimization.

As the screenshot image taken from Google search listings below shows, many site owners have not yet configured their sites to use WordPress permalinks …

Although these sites are 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 traffic results, you should set up 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 posts, so your content can easily go from something that is non-SEO friendly like this …

To this …

In this tutorial, you will learn how to set up the Permalinks section of your WordPress site to display posts with SEO-friendly URLs instead of the out-of-the-box linking structure and help every new post you add automatically get better indexing in search engines like Google.

Changing Your WordPress Permalinks

In your WP 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 “pretty” permalinks instead for our posts. To do this, we need to specify a different Permalink structure than the default one.

Common Settings – Permalinks

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/cruise-travel/top-european-river-cruise-destinations

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=7036

(Using permalinks helps search engines and visitors understand what your content is about)

Permalink Tags

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

• %year% – The year the post is published, displayed as four digits (e.g. ‘2010’)
• %monthnum% – The month your post gets published (e.g. ‘07’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘29’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘10’)
• %minute% – The minute the post gets published (e.g. ‘06’)
• %second% – The exact second your post gets published (e.g. ‘07’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘5996’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of your post title. For example, if the post title is ”The Five Don’ts Of DIY Home Repair!”, the postname tag will convert this into “the-five-donts-of-diy-home-repair” (all lower case characters and no punctuation marks) in the URL. Tip: You can edit the URL 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’ setting.

Optional Permalink Settings

If you need to set up custom permalinks for your category and tag archive pages you can do this in this section.

This changes the ‘base’ category or tag for your URLs using the following syntax:

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

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

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

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

To this …

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

Remember to save any changes after you have 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

Set Up Your Categories

To get the best 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 and author of the WordPress SEO plugin Joost de Valk, here are a few points to keep in mind if you are wondering whether you should add categories to your permalink structure or not:

• 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 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 ”better” permalink structure to use. Use the 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 articles.

Avoid Using Permalink Syntaxes That Time-Stamp Your Posts

Another tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your aim is to run a news site or there is a special reason why you need to date your content, avoid using date-based permalink options for your URLs.

(Avoid setting up URL structures that time-stamp your content)

Although using URL structures that time-stamp your posts is better that using no permalinks at all from an SEO point-of-view, visitors are less likely to click on a post if it is a couple of years old, even if the content is relevant to the answers they are searching for.

Changing Permalinks In Site With Indexed Posts

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 want to change the permalink structure, make sure that this is something that absolutely needs doing, as changing permalinks after your site has already been going for a while can create issues and errors.

Add 301 Redirection

As you’ve seen in earlier screenshots, many website owners (or their web developers) seem to be unaware of the search-friendly URLs feature of WordPress.

Maybe when you started out, your site used the default WordPress permalinks and now you would like to improve your SEO. Perhaps your site was configured to display post dates in your URLs and now all of your content is showing as being 2-3 years old and you want to delete the date tags of your URLs.

The best way to modify your URL structure without negatively impacting your site’s SEO or rankings is to add ‘301 redirects’ to reassign all links that were set up using the old permalinks structure to web URLs using the new permalinks structure.

Search engines interpret a code ‘301’ as a link that has permanently moved elsewhere. 301 redirection is the most efficient and search engine friendly way to redirect visitors to new web page destinations and avoid running into page errors when clicking on an old link.

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

You can add a link redirection system to your do this using a plugin 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 301 redirects using a WP redirection plugin or get professional assistance)

Congratulations! Now you know how to configure your site’s permalinks to display search engine-friendly URLs for your posts. For additional information on using Permalinks, refer to the WordPress codex here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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