Wouldn’t it be great if after adding a new page to your website, the following took place … just from your page address:

• Potential visitors could easily understand what the post was about,
• Google could easily discover your posts and correctly index their content to improve your search results,
• Every single content item added to your website or blog would have a unique ID, 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 WordPress posts, categories and other taxonomies (a way to group things together) like archives.

A permalink is the web address that other people use to link to your posts or sections of your site or the links you send in emails pointing readers to content items on your site. Permalinks are often called “pretty” URLs.

Permalinks make the web address pointing to each post on your site permanent, hence a perma-link.

Why Do You Need To Use Permalinks?

As you are probably aware, WordPress is one of the best CMS applications you can use when it comes to publishing search engines optimized content.

WordPress is not only well optimized right out of the box, but the SEO aspect can be easily enhanced using excellent SEO plugins.

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

Permalinks can be used to make the links on your site into “prettier” 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 you may need to use permalinks in WordPress.

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

The link structure shown above is used by WordPress to find data inside your database. It doesn’t really help your site with on-site SEO.

As the screenshot taken directly from Google search results below shows, many WordPress users haven’t yet set up their permalinks …

Although these sites are still getting their content indexed on search engines, many site owners are missing out on extra SEO benefits.

To get optimal SEO benefit out of using WordPress and improve your site’s traffic results, you will want to make sure to configure your permalinks structure to make it more SEO-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 posts, so your pages can easily go from this …

To something with an SEO-friendly URL like this …

In this tutorial, you will learn how to configure your WordPress permalinks to display your posts using search engine-friendly URLs instead of the default linking structure and help every new post you publish get better indexing in Google.

Changing WordPress Permalinks

In your WordPress dashboard 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 search engine friendly URLs instead for our posts. To do this, we need to specify a different Permalink structure than the one set by 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 …

(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/river-cruises/cruise-holiday-bargains

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=5300

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

How To Create Pretty WordPress URLs

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

• %year% – The year your post is published, four digits (e.g. ‘2012’)
• %monthnum% – The month your post is published (e.g. ‘07’)
• %day% – The day your post gets published (e.g. ‘20’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘01’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘08’)
• %second% – The exact second the post is published (e.g. ‘26’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘2357’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of the post title. For example, if the 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 letters converted to lower case and punctuation marks deleted) in the URL. Tip: You can always edit this 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 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 ‘Custom Structure’.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

This section lets you configure custom structures for your tag and category page URLs.

You can change the ‘base’ tag or category of your 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 display your category links as ‘http://domain.com/recipes/uncategorized/’.

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

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

To something like this …

If you leave the optional settings fields blank the defaults 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 – Tips

Categories

To get maximum benefit out of using Permalinks, remember 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 plugin developer Joost de Valk, here are a few things to consider if you are wondering whether or not to add categories to your permalink structure:

• If your domain is short and your category 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 share 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. 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 tutorials.

Avoid Setting Up Permalinks That Time-Stamp Your Content

Another great tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your website provides news, or you have a special reason to date your site’s content, avoid selecting date-based permalink settings when setting up your URLs.

(Avoid setting up permalinks that date your content)

Although setting up permalinks that date your posts may be considered better that using no permalinks at all from an SEO point-of-view, people 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 Blog Already Has Lots Of Indexed Content?

Normally, your permalinks should be set up when you perform a new WordPress installation. 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 absolutely something that needs doing, as doing so can create issues and loss of traffic.

Use 301 Redirection

As you’ve seen in the above screenshots of actual search results, some WordPress site owners (or their web developers) are unaware of the SEO-friendly URLs feature of WordPress.

Maybe you started out using the default WordPress permalinks and now you want to improve your SEO. Perhaps your website or blog was originally set up to display post dates in your web address and now all of your content is perceived as being outdated and you want to delete the date portion in the permalinks.

To change your URL structure without affecting your site’s SEO in a negative way you will need to add ‘301 redirections’ to point all links set up using the old permalinks structure to URLs that use the new permalink structure.

A code ‘301’ is interpreted by search engines as a link that has permanently moved. 301 redirection is the most efficient and search engine friendly way to redirect visitors to new website destinations and avoid running into ”page not found” errors when following an old link.

To create an effective permalink structure change and avoid SEO problems, sending visitors to broken links, etc. you should install and set up your redirection system before messing with the permalink structure of your site.

You can WP site using plugins like Simple 301 Redirects, or Redirection, or get a professional to help you set up and redirect your permalinks correctly to avoid issues and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up URL redirections using plugins or get professional assistance)

Congratulations! Now you know how to configure your WordPress site or blog to display search engine-friendly URLs for your posts. To learn more about using Permalinks, refer to the WordPress codex here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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