Wouldn’t it be great if after publishing content on your website or blog, the following took place … just from your post URL:

• Potential visitors could easily gain an understanding of what the page was about,
• Google would easily discover your pages and correctly classify their content to improve your search results,
• Every single piece of content you create on your website or blog would have its own unique identifier, making your site easier to manage.

Well, this is what a permalink lets you do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

What Are Permalinks?

Permalinks are the permanent URLs to an individual WordPress post, category, or other taxonomy (a way to group things together) like archives.

A permalink is the web address that other people will use to link to articles or sections of your site or the links you send in an email pointing readers to posts on your site. Some people refer to permalinks as “pretty” URLs.

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

Why Do You Need To Use Permalinks?

Hopefully, you are probably aware that, WordPress is one of the best CMS applications available when it comes to SEO.

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

If you focus on the SEO aspect of your site, then you should not ignore the importance of your URLs. Search engines like Google tend to give special significance to 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 can also improve the usability, aesthetics, and forward-compatibility of your links.

Now … let’s turn our attention to why it’s best to use permalinks in WordPress.

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

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

As the screenshot taken directly from Google search listings below shows, many WordPress users are still using out-of-the-box settings when publishing content online …

Although Google is clearly 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 and improve your site’s rankings, you will want to make sure to set up your permalinks structure to make it more search engine-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 pages can easily go from something that is non-SEO friendly like this …

To this …

Out of the box, WordPress post URLs are not very SEO-friendly. This tutorial explains how to configure your WordPress permalinks to automatically get better indexing in search engines like Google.

Configuring Your WordPress Permalinks

In your WordPress administration section click on, 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 “pretty” permalinks instead for our posts. To do this, we need to specify a different Permalink structure than the one set by default.

Common Permalink 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/europe-cruises/how-to-save-money-on-cruise-travel

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=7135

(Using permalinks helps readers and search engines understand what the content is about)

Pretty URL 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. ‘2015’)
• %monthnum% – The month your post is published (e.g. ‘04’)
• %day% – The day your post gets published (e.g. ‘29’)
• %hour% – The hour your post gets published (e.g. ‘01’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘08’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘05’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘674’)
• %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 letters and punctuation symbols removed) in the URL. Tip: You can always edit the URL 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 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 choosing ‘Custom Structure’ and using the /%postname%/ tag.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

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

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

• 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 make the following change 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 defaults 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 maximum SEO benefit from using Permalinks, remember 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 some points to keep in mind 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 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 share and decrease the SEO benefit.
• 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 using category vs no category there 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 web address short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We cover WordPress categories in another article.

Avoid Using Permalinks That Time-Stamp Your Content

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

(Avoid setting up permalinks that time-stamp your posts)

Although setting up URL structures that time-stamp your posts is better that using no permalinks at all from an SEO aspect, visitors 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.

What If My Site Already Has Indexed Posts?

Normally, your site’s permalinks should be configured when you install a new WordPress site. This should be part of your site planning process.

If your website has been running for a while 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 changing permalinks after your site has already been running for a while can create SEO issues and loss of traffic.

Use 301 Redirection

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

Maybe when you started, your site used the default WordPress permalinks and now you want to optimize your site better for search engines. Maybe your website or blog was configured to display post dates in your URLs and now all of your posts are perceived as being out-of-date and you want to delete the date tags of your permalinks.

The best way to edit your URL structure without affecting your site’s SEO in a negative way is to use ‘301 redirects’ to point links that were set up using the old URL structure to destinations using the new syntax.

Search engines interpret a ’301′ code as a link that has permanently moved. 301 redirects are the most efficient and search engine friendly way to redirect visitors to new website destinations and avoid running into ‘404’ (Page not found) errors if clicking on an old link.

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

You can add a link redirection system to your do this using WP plugins like Simple 301 Redirects, or Redirection, or get a professional to assist you with setting up and redirecting your permalinks correctly to avoid issues and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up 301 redirections using redirection plugins or use the services of a professional)

Congratulations! Now you know about the built-in system WordPress uses to display SEO-friendly URLs for your posts. To learn more about using Permalinks, refer to the official WordPress documentation here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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