Wouldn’t it be great if you could publish a new page on your website, and the following would then take place … just from your page URL:

• New visitors could quickly understand what your content was about,
• Search engines would be able to easily find your page and correctly classify your content to improve your search rankings,
• Every single post added to your website would have its own unique identifier, making your content easier to manage.

Well, with permalinks this is very easy to do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalink – What Is It?

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

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

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

Permalinks – Why Do We Need To Use Them?

Hopefully, by now you probably know that, WordPress is one of the best Content Management Systems you can use when it comes to SEO.

WordPress is not only well optimized right out of the box, but there are SEO plugins you can install that can further help to improve its SEO aspect.

If you focus on the SEO aspect of your site or blog, then you cannot ignore the importance of its site’s URLs. Google places considerable weight on the structure of a site’s URLs when indexing its site pages.

Permalinks are used to turn links on your site into “prettier” and more “search engine friendly” URLs. Permalinks 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 when publishing content in WordPress.

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

WordPress uses the above link structure to locate data within its database. It does not mean much to anyone, and it doesn’t help your site with on-site search engine optimization.

As you can see from the screenshot below taken directly from Google search results, many WordPress site owners haven’t yet configured their sites to publish search optimized content …

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

To get the maximum SEO benefit out of using WordPress and improve your site’s rankings, you should set up your permalinks structure to make it more search engine-friendly by displaying relevant keywords in your URL, instead of meaningless characters.

WordPress offers the ability to create a custom URL structure for your published and archived posts, so your pages can easily go from this …

To this …

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

Changing Your WordPress Permalinks

Log into your WordPress dashboard and click on 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 “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 SEO-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/river-cruises/top-european-river-cruises

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=9160

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

How To Create Permalink Tags

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

• %year% – The year of the post, four digits (e.g. ‘2013’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘01’)
• %day% – The day your post gets published (e.g. ‘18’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘16’)
• %minute% – The minute your post gets published (e.g. ‘08’)
• %second% – The exact second the post gets published (e.g. ‘40’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘9084’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of the 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 removed) in the URL. Tip: You can edit the URL wording 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 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 the ‘Custom Structure’ setting.

Optional Permalink Settings

If you need to set up custom permalinks for your tag and category 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, using “recipes” as your category base will make your category links display as ‘http://domain.com/recipes/uncategorized/’.

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

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

To something like this …

If you leave these fields blank the default settings will be used.

Remember to save your changes when you are 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

Use Short, Descriptive Categories

To get the best possible SEO benefit out of 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 consider if you are wondering whether you should add categories to your permalink structure or not:

• If your category slug is short and descriptive (e.g. uses a relevant keyword or keyword phrase), you may want to use the category tag 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 copy and reduce the SEO benefit.
• If you are going to post content under multiple categories, then it’s recommended that you do not use the category tag in your permalink structure.

Ultimately, when it comes to category vs no category there is no ”better” permalink structure to use. Use the permalink structure you think will suit your site best. Your web address should be short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We provide detailed information about WordPress categories in another article.

Create Timeless Posts

Another tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your website is a news blog or you have any special reason to add dates to your URLs, avoid choosing date-based permalink settings when setting up your blog’s URLs.

(Avoid using URL structures that time-stamp your content)

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.

What If My Site Already Has Lots Of Content?

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

If your site is already established 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 something that absolutely needs doing, as making changes to permalinks after your site has been going for a while could create issues and errors.

301 Redirection

As you’ve seen earlier, many WordPress site owners (or their web developers) are completely unaware of the permalinks feature of WordPress.

Maybe when you started out, your site used the default WordPress URL structure and now you want to improve your site’s SEO. Perhaps your website or blog was originally set up to display post dates in your web address and now all of your posts are showing as being old and you want to delete the date tags of the URLs.

The best way to change your permalinks without negatively impacting your site’s SEO or rankings is to add ‘301 redirects’ to point all links set up using the previous permalinks syntax to web addresses using the new syntax.

Search engines interpret a ’301′ code as a link that has been permanently relocated to another destination. 301 redirection is the most efficient and search engine friendly way to redirect visitors to new website destinations and avoid ‘404’ (Page not found) errors when clicking on an old link.

To effectively change your syntax and avoid SEO problems, sending visitors to broken links, etc. you will need to add your redirection system before changing the permalink structure of your site.

You can WordPress site or blog using a redirection plugin like Simple 301 Redirects, or Redirection, or get a professional to help you set up and redirect your permalinks correctly to avoid problems and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up 301 redirects using plugins or get professional assistance)

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

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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