Wouldn’t it be great if you could simply add a new page to your WordPress website or blog, and the following took place … just from your page address:

• Site readers could quickly assess what the content was about,
• Google could easily discover your post and correctly index the content to improve your search results,
• Every single piece of content published on your website would have a unique ID, making things easier to manage.

Well, with permalinks this can easily be done!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

What Are Permalinks?

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

A permalink is the web address that others will use to link to your posts or sections of your site or the links you send in emails pointing to your posts. Permalinks are often called “pretty” URLs.

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

Why Use Permalinks?

As you have probably heard by now, WordPress is one of the best CMS applications you can use when it comes to SEO.

WordPress is not only well optimized straight out of the box, but the SEO aspect can be considerably enhanced with SEO plugins.

If you focus on the SEO aspect of your site or blog, then you should not ignore the importance of your site’s URLs. Search engines like Google place considerable weight on the URL structure of your site.

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

Now … let’s take a look at the reason why you may need to set up permalinks if publishing content in WordPress.

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

The link structure shown above is used by WordPress to find information within your database. It does not help your website with on-site search engine optimization.

As the screenshot image below shows, many WordPress site owners haven’t yet configured their sites to use WordPress permalinks …

Although Google is still indexing the above sites, the owners of these sites are missing out on additional SEO benefits.

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

WordPress lets you create a custom URL structure for your published posts, so your content can easily go from this …

To this …

In this step-by-step tutorial, you will learn how to configure your WordPress permalinks to display your posts using search engine-friendly URLs instead of the out-of-the-box URL structure and help every new post you add get better indexing results in Google.

Configuring Your WordPress Permalinks

In your WordPress admin section 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 will 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 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/river-cruise-holiday-deals

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=6750

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

How To Use 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, displayed as four digits (e.g. ‘2014’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘07’)
• %day% – The day your post gets published (e.g. ‘07’)
• %hour% – The hour your post is published (e.g. ‘16’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘41’)
• %second% – The exact second your post gets published (e.g. ‘24’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘6953’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted version of your post title. For example, if the 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 marks deleted) in the URL. Tip: You can always edit the wording in your post title 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 selecting the ‘Custom Structure’ option and using the /%postname%/ tag.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

If you need to set up custom permalinks for your category and tag archive page URLs you can do this in this section.

This changes the ‘base’ tag or category for your 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/category_name/’.

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

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

To this …

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

Remember to save your changes when 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

Set Up Your Categories

To get the 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 points to keep in mind if you are wondering whether or not to add categories to your permalink structure:

• If 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 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 it’s recommended that you do not use the category tag in your permalink structure.

Despite being the subject of intense debate in WordPress SEO circles, when it comes to adding category vs no category there really is no ideal permalink structure to use. Use the permalink structure that you think will suit your site 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 another article.

Make Your Content Timeless

Another great tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your goal is to run a news website or you have any special reason to date your site’s content, it’s best to avoid choosing date-based permalink settings when configuring your blog’s URLs.

(Avoid setting up URL structures that time-stamp your content)

Visitors are less likely to click on a post if it is 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 Posts?

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

If your website or blog is already established 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 absolutely necessary, as changing permalinks after your site has already been running for a while can create SEO issues and errors.

Use 301 Redirects

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

Maybe you started out using 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 web address and now all of your posts are perceived as being out-of-date and you want to delete the date portion of the URLs.

The best way to modify your permalinks without negatively impacting your site’s SEO is to use ‘301 redirections’ to reassign all links using the previous permalinks syntax to destinations that use the new permalinks syntax.

A code ‘301’ is interpreted by search engines as a link that has been permanently moved to another location. 301 redirects are the most efficient and search engine friendly way to redirect users to new web page destinations and avoid running into ”page not found” errors if following an old link.

To create an effective syntax change and avoid damaging your search rankings, sending visitors to broken links, etc. you will need to add a redirection system before changing the permalink structure of your site.

You can site using WP redirection 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 issues and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up 301 redirects using plugins or use the services of a professional)

Congratulations! Now you know about the built-in system WordPress uses to display SEO-friendly URLs for your posts. For additional information on using Permalinks, see the official WordPress documentation below:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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