Wouldn’t it be great if after adding new content to your website or blog, the following happened … just from your web address:

• Site visitors could easily determine what your content is about,
• Search engines would be able to easily discover your post and correctly classify its content to improve your search rankings,
• Every item of content you create on your website would have its own unique identifier, making things easier to manage.

Well, with permalinks this is really easy to do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

What Is A Permalink?

Permalinks are the permanent URLs to your individual posts, categories and other taxonomies (a way to organize things together) like archives.

A permalink is the web address that others use to link to your articles or sections of your site or the links you send in an email pointing readers to content items on your site. Some people also call permalinks “pretty” URLs.

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

Permalinks – Why Do I Need To Use Them?

As you are probably aware, WordPress is one of the best CMS applications you can use when it comes to SEO.

WordPress is not only well optimized right out of the box, but its SEO aspect can be further fine tuned with excellent SEO plugins.

If you focus on the SEO aspect of your site, then you cannot ignore the importance of its site’s URLs. Search engines like Google tend to pay special attention to the URL structure of your site.

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

Now … let’s take a look at the reason why it’s best to use permalinks in WordPress.

Typically, a default WordPress installation uses a non-search engine friendly URL-naming structure for your posts that looks like this …

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

As the screenshot image taken directly from Google search listings below shows, many site owners haven’t yet set up their sites to use permalinks …

Although these sites are getting their content indexed on search engines, they are missing out on additional SEO benefits.

To get maximum SEO benefit from using and improve your site’s rankings, you should configure your permalinks structure to make it more search engine-friendly by displaying relevant keywords in your URL, instead of meaningless numbers and symbols.

WordPress offers you the ability to create a custom URL structure for your published and archived posts, so your content can easily go from something that is non-SEO friendly like this …

To something with an SEO-friendly URL like this …

Out of the box, WordPress post URLs are not very SEO-friendly. In this tutorial, you will learn how to set up your WP permalinks to help you get better indexing results in Google.

How To Configure WordPress Permalinks

In your WordPress dashboard 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 a “pretty” permalink instead for our posts. To do this, we will need to specify a different Permalink structure than the default one.

Common Permalink Settings

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

(Set up 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/travel-europe/how-to-save-money-on-cruise-travel

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=24

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

Pretty URL 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, displayed as four digits (e.g. ‘2013’)
• %monthnum% – The month your post is published (e.g. ‘12’)
• %day% – The day the post gets published (e.g. ‘17’)
• %hour% – The hour the post is published (e.g. ‘03’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘17’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘47’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘625’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of the post title. For example, if your post title is ”The Five Don’ts Of DIY Home Repair!”, the postname tag will convert this into “the-five-donts-of-diy-home-repair” (all lower case letters and exclamation symbols deleted) in the URL. Tip: You can edit this 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 adding the /%postname%/ tag in ‘Custom Structure’.

Optional Permalink Settings

Here you can set up custom structures for your tag and category archive pages.

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

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

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

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 something like this …

If you leave these fields blank WordPress uses the default settings.

Remember to save your changes when you have 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 more 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, 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 things to keep in mind if you are wondering whether you should add categories to your permalink structure or not:

• If your domain is short and your category name is short and descriptive (e.g. adds a relevant keyword or keyword phrase to your URL), 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 or copy and decrease the SEO benefit.
• Do you plan to post content under only one category or multiple categories? If you plan 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 is no ”better” permalink structure to use. We recommend choosing the permalink structure you think will suit your needs best and that will make your site’s web addresses short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We cover WordPress categories in another article.

Make Your Content Timeless

Another great tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your aim is to run a news blog or there is a special reason why you need to create dated web URLs, it’s best to avoid choosing date-based permalink options when setting up your site’s URLs.

(Avoid using permalinks that date your content)

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

What About Changing Permalinks In Established Sites?

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

If your site has been running for a while or your site already has a lot of content indexed in the search engines and you would like to change the permalink structure, make sure that this is really something that needs to be done, as doing so can create SEO issues and loss of traffic.

Use 301 Redirects

As you’ve seen in earlier screenshots, some website owners (or their web developers) seem to be 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 optimize your site better for search engines. Perhaps your site was configured to display post dates in your URLs and now all of your posts are showing as being 2-3 years old and you want to delete the date tags in your permalinks.

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

Search engines interpret a code ‘301’ as a link that has permanently relocated to another address. 301 redirection is the most efficient and search engine friendly way to redirect visitors to new website destinations and avoid ”page not found” errors if following an old link.

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

You can WP site using plugins like Simple 301 Redirects, or Redirection, or use the services of a professional to assist you with setting up and redirecting your permalinks correctly to avoid any issues and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up URL redirections using a WP redirection plugin or use the services of a professional)

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

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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