Wouldn’t it be great if after publishing a new post on your WordPress site, the following could happen … all from your page address:

• New visitors could easily assess what the content was about,
• Google would be able to easily discover your posts and correctly index their content for better search rankings,
• Every single content item you create on your website would have a unique identifier, making things easier to manage.

Well, with WordPress permalinks you can!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – Definition

A permalink is the permanent URL to an individual WordPress post, category, or other taxonomy (a way to organize things together) like archives.

A permalink is the URL that visitors and search engines use to link to 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 blog permanent, hence a permalink.

Why Use Permalinks?

As you have probably heard by now, WordPress is one of the best CMS tools available when it comes to publishing search optimized content.

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

If you are looking to optimize the SEO aspect of your site, then you should not ignore the importance of your URLs. Google tends to give special consideration to the URL structure of your site.

Permalinks are used to make the 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 review the reason why you may need to set up 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 above link structure is used by WordPress to locate data within its database. It does not help your site with on-site SEO.

As you can see from the screenshot below, many WordPress site owners have not set up their permalinks …

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

To get the maximum SEO benefit from using WordPress 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 lets you create a custom URL structure for your published and archived posts, so your content can go from something that is non-SEO friendly like this …

To something with an SEO-friendly URL like this …

By default, WordPress URLs are not very search engine-friendly. This step-by-step tutorial shows you how to set up your permalinks in WordPress to help your content rank better in Google.

Setting Up WordPress Permalinks

In your WordPress dashboard 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 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.

Permalinks > Common Settings

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 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/budget-cruises/river-cruise-holiday-deals

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=4042

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

Creating SEO-Friendly Tags

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

• %year% – The year the post is published, four digits (e.g. ‘2013’)
• %monthnum% – The month the post gets published (e.g. ‘07’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘01’)
• %hour% – The hour the post gets published (e.g. ‘05’)
• %minute% – The minute the post is published (e.g. ‘09’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘08’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘2551’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted version of the post title. For example, if the post title is ”It Ain’t Worth Doin’ No More!”, the postname tag will convert this into “it-aint-worth-doin-no-more” (all characters converted to lower case and no exclamation symbols) in the URL. Tip: You can always edit the URL wording 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 ‘Custom Structure’ and using the /%postname%/ tag.

Optional Permalink Settings

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

This changes the ‘base’ tag or category URLs using the following structure:

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

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

So, if you make the following change in your permalinks Optional > Category base settings section …

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

To something like this …

If you leave the fields blank the default settings 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 – Additional Info

Categories

To get more SEO benefit from 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 and author of the WordPress SEO plugin 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 domain is short and 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 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.

Ultimately, when it comes to category vs no category there really is no ”better” permalink structure to use. Choose a permalink structure that you think will suit your needs best. Your post URLs should be short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We provide more information about WordPress categories in other tutorials.

Don’t Use Date Permalinks

Another tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your aim is to run a news website or there is a special reason why you need to add dates to your post URLs, avoid selecting date-based permalink options when setting up your URLs.

(Avoid using URL structures that date your content)

Although using permalinks that date your posts is better that using no permalinks at all from an SEO aspect, visitors 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 An Established Blog?

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

If your website is already established or your site already has many posts indexed in the search engines and you would like to change the permalink structure, make sure that this is absolutely necessary, as doing so could create SEO issues and loss of traffic.

301 Redirection

As you’ve seen in the above screenshots of actual search results, many site owners (or whoever set up their site) are unaware of the search-friendly URLs feature of WordPress.

Maybe when you started, your site used the default WordPress URL structure and now you would like to optimize your site better for search engines. Perhaps your website was originally set up to display post dates in your URLs and now all of your posts are showing as being two or three years old and you want to delete the date portion in your URLs.

To edit your permalinks without negatively impacting your site’s SEO or rankings you will need to add ‘301 redirects’ to point all links that use the old permalinks structure to post URLs using the new permalinks syntax.

Search engines interpret a code ‘301’ as a link that has been permanently moved to another location. 301 redirection is the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect visitors to new web page destinations and avoid running into ”page not found” errors if they click on an old link.

To effectively change your permalink syntax and avoid SEO problems, sending visitors to error pages, etc. you should add a redirection system before messing with the permalink structure of your site.

You can WP site using a plugin like Simple 301 Redirects, or Redirection, or get a professional to assist you with setting up and redirecting your permalinks correctly to avoid any problems and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up a 301 redirection system for your changed URLs using plugins or get professional assistance)

Congratulations! Now you know how to change your WordPress site to display SEO-friendly URLs for your posts and improve your search search rankings. To learn more about using Permalinks, refer to the official WordPress documentation below:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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