Wouldn’t it be great if you could publish new content on your website or blog, and the following happened … all from your URL:

• Readers could quickly determine what your post was about,
• Google would be able to easily find your pages and correctly classify their content for better search rankings,
• Every content item on your website or blog would have a unique ID, making your site easier to manage.

Well, this is what permalinks let you do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – Definition

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 URL that others will use to link to posts or sections of your site or the links you send in emails pointing readers to articles on your site. Permalinks are often called “pretty” URLs.

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

Permalinks – Why Do We Need To Use Them?

As you are probably aware, 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 SEO plugins you can install that can help to fine tuned its SEO aspect further.

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

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

Now … let’s turn our attention to the reason why you should configure your permalinks if publishing content in WordPress.

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

The above link structure is used by WordPress to find information inside your database. It does not mean much to anyone, and it doesn’t help your website with on-site SEO.

As the screenshot image taken from Google search results below shows, many WordPress site owners haven’t yet configured their permalinks …

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

To get maximum SEO benefit out of using 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 posts, so your content can easily go from this …

To something like this …

By default, WordPress URLs are not very SEO-friendly. This tutorial explains how to configure your permalinks in WordPress to help your content rank better in search engines like Google.

Setting Up WordPress Permalinks

In your WordPress admin 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 search engine friendly URLs instead for our posts. To do this, we need to specify a different Permalink structure than the default.

Common Settings

In the Common Settings section, select Custom Structure, then add one or more ‘tags’ (see below) to create search engine-friendly URLs …

(Set up 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/river-cruise-holiday-deals

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=4950

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

Creating Permalink Tags

“Pretty” permalinks, or SEO-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. ‘2015’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘06’)
• %day% – The day your post gets published (e.g. ‘03’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘14’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘50’)
• %second% – The exact second your post gets published (e.g. ‘14’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘2357’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of your post title. For example, if your post title is “Top Five Budget Travel Tips!”, the postname tag will convert this into “top-five-budget-travel-tips” (all letters converted to lower case and no exclamation symbols) in the URL. Tip: You can edit this 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 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.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

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

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

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

To this …

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

Remember to save any 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 – Additional Info

Categories

To get greater SEO benefit from 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 and author of the WordPress SEO plugin Joost de Valk, here are some 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. adds a relevant keyword or keyword phrase to your URL), 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 reduce the SEO benefit.
• If you are going 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 site 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.

Make Your Posts Timeless

Another useful tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your site provides news or time-specific information, or you have a special reason to date your content, avoid choosing date-based permalink options for your blog’s URLs.

(Avoid using URL structures that date your posts)

People are less likely to click on a post that is several years old, even if the content is relevant to what they are searching for.

What About Sites With Published Content?

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

If your website or blog has been running for a while 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 doing so can create issues and errors.

301 Redirection

As you’ve seen earlier, some website owners (or their web developers) seem to be completely 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. Maybe your website or blog was originally set up to display post dates in your web address and now all of your content is showing as being 2-3 years old and you want to delete the date portion in your URLs.

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

Search engines interpret a code ‘301’ as a link that has been permanently moved elsewhere. 301 redirects are the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect users to new site destinations and avoid ‘404’ (Page not found) errors if they click on an old link.

To effectively change your permalink syntax and avoid damaging your rankings, sending visitors to broken links, etc. you should add your redirection system before changing the permalink structure of your site.

You can WP site or blog using 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 301 redirections using redirection plugins or use the services of a professional)

Congratulations! Now you know how to set up your permalinks to display SEO-friendly URLs for your posts and improve your search results. To learn more about using Permalinks, refer to the WordPress codex below:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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