Wouldn’t it be great if after publishing content on your WordPress site, the following happened … just from your page URL:

• Visitors could quickly glean what the page is about,
• Google could easily discover your post and correctly classify the content to improve your search rankings,
• Every single item of content published on your website or blog would have its own unique identifier, making things 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 web address that visitors and search engines use to link to your articles or sections of your site or the links you send in emails pointing to posts on your site. Permalinks are often called “pretty” URLs.

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

Why Use Permalinks?

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 great for SEO out of the box, but there are excellent SEO plugins you can install that can help to finetune its SEO aspect considerably.

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

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

Now … let’s take a look at the reason why you should set up permalinks in WordPress.

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

WordPress uses the above link with a string query to locate information within your database. It does not mean anything to visitors or search engines, and it doesn’t help your site with on-site SEO.

As you can see from the screenshot image below taken from Google search listings, many site owners haven’t set up their permalinks …

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

To get maximum SEO benefit out of 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 lets you create a custom URL structure for your published posts, so your content can go from this …

To this …

By default, WordPress post URLs are not very SEO-friendly. In this step-by-step tutorial, you will learn how to set up your permalinks in WordPress to help your content rank better in search engines like Google.

Setting Up Your WordPress Permalinks

Log into your WP admin and select Settings > Permalinks …

This brings 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 “pretty” permalink instead for our posts. To do this, we will 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 search engine-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-tips/seven-top-european-river-cruise-destinations

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=123

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

Search Engine-Friendly Tags

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

• %year% – The year of the post, displayed as four digits (e.g. ‘2011’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘07’)
• %day% – The day the post gets published (e.g. ‘16’)
• %hour% – The hour your post is published (e.g. ‘24’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘33’)
• %second% – The exact second your post is published (e.g. ‘27’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘8055’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted version of the post title. For example, if your 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 deleted) in the URL. Tip: You can always edit this text 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 choosing the ‘Custom Structure’ setting and using the /%postname%/ tag.

Optional Permalink Settings

In this section, you can configure custom structures for your tag and category page URLs.

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

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

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

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

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

To something like this …

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

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 greater benefit from 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 things to keep in mind if you are wondering whether or not to add categories to your permalinks:

• If your domain is short and your category slug is short and descriptive (e.g. uses a relevant keyword or keyword phrase), you may want to add the category tag 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 copy and reduce the SEO benefit.
• 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 category vs no category there really is no ideal permalink structure to use. We recommend choosing the permalink structure you think will suit your needs best and that will make your post URLs short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We provide more information about WordPress categories in other articles.

Create Timeless 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 choosing date-based permalink settings when configuring your blog’s URLs.

(Avoid setting up URL structures that date your content)

Although setting up URL structures that date your posts is better that using no permalinks at all from an SEO perspective, 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 Sites With Published Posts?

Normally, it’s best to set up your site’s permalinks when you perform a new WordPress installation. This should be part of your site planning process.

If your website or blog 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 issues and errors.

Add 301 Redirection

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

Maybe you started out using the default WordPress permalinks and now you want to optimize your site better for search engines. Maybe your site was originally set up to display post dates in your web address and now all of your posts are perceived as being outdated and you want to delete the date portion of your URLs.

To modify your permalink structure without affecting your site’s SEO or existing rankings in a negative way you should add ‘301 redirects’ to point all links that were set up using the old URL structure to links using the new permalinks syntax.

A code ‘301’ is interpreted by search engines as a link that has permanently relocated. 301 redirects are the most efficient and search engine friendly way to redirect users to new web page destinations and avoid ‘404’ (Page not found) errors when they click on an old link.

To effectively change your permalink structure and avoid damaging your rankings, sending visitors to broken links, 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 a WP 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 any issues and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up a redirection system for your changed URLs using redirection plugins or get professional help)

Congratulations! Now you know how to configure your site to display SEO-friendly URLs for your posts and improve your search results. To learn more about using Permalinks, see the WordPress codex here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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