Wouldn’t it be great if you could just add a new post to your WordPress site, and the following happened … just from your URL:

• Potential visitors to your site could quickly determine what your post was about,
• Google would easily find your pages and correctly classify their content to improve your search rankings,
• Every post you create on your website would have a unique ID, making your content easier to manage.

Well, with WordPress permalinks this is very easy to do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

What’s A Permalink?

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

A permalink is the URL that other people will 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 website. Some people also refer to permalinks as “pretty” URLs.

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

Permalinks – Why Use Them?

Hopefully, you are probably aware that, WordPress is one of the best CMS applications available when it comes to SEO.

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

If you focus on the SEO aspect of your site or blog, then you should not ignore the importance of your site’s URLs. Google tends to give special consideration to the structure of URLs when indexing its content.

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

Now … let’s turn our attention to the reason why it’s best to set up permalinks in WordPress.

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

WordPress uses the link structure shown above to find information inside your database. It does not mean anything to either visitors or search engines, and it doesn’t help your website with on-site search engine optimization.

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

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

To get the maximum SEO benefit from using and improve your site’s traffic results, you will want to make sure to set up 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 this …

To this …

Out of the box, WordPress URLs are not very SEO-friendly. This step-by-step tutorial explains how to configure your WP permalinks to help your content rank better in search engines like Google.

Configuring Your WordPress Permalinks

In your WP administration menu, select 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 will need to specify a different Permalink structure than the default.

Common Settings – Permalinks

In the Common Settings section, select Custom Structure, then add one or more ‘tags’ (see below) to create search engine-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/cruise-deals/top-3-european-cruise-destinations

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=9760

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

How To Use Permalink 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, four digits (e.g. ‘2012’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘08’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘03’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘20’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘40’)
• %second% – The exact second your post gets published (e.g. ‘21’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘599’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of the post title. For example, if your 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 lower case letters and removed punctuation symbols) in the URL. Tip: You can always edit the wording in your post titles 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 choosing ‘Custom Structure’ and using the /%postname%/ tag.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

If you need to configure custom permalinks for your tag and category URLs you can do this in this section.

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

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

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

So, if you enter the following 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 optional settings fields blank the default settings will be used.

Remember to save any changes after 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 – Additional Information

Use Short, Descriptive Categories

To get the optimal 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 expert and author of the WordPress SEO plugin 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 slug is short and descriptive (e.g. uses a relevant keyword or keyword phrase), you may want to use categories 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 reduce the SEO benefit.
• Do you plan to post content under only one category or multiple categories? 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.

Despite being the subject of intense debate in WordPress SEO circles, when it comes to category vs no category there 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 another tutorial.

Create Timeless Posts

Another tip from Joost de Valk is that unless you run a news blog or you have a special reason to add dates to your URLs, avoid selecting date-based permalink syntax when configuring your URLs.

(Avoid using permalinks that date your content)

Although setting up URL structures that date your posts is better that using no permalinks at all from an SEO aspect, people are less likely to click on a post if it is a couple of years old, even if the content is relevant to the answers they are searching for.

What If My Site Has Published Content?

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

If your website is already established or you have a lot of content already indexed in the search engines and you want to change the permalink structure, make sure that this is really something that needs doing, as making changes to permalinks after your site has already been running for a while can create issues and loss of traffic.

301 Redirection

As you’ve seen earlier, many WordPress 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 permalinks and now you want to improve your SEO. Maybe your website or blog was configured to display post dates in your URLs and now all of your posts are perceived as being outdated and you want to remove the date tags of your URLs.

To change your permalinks without negatively impacting your site’s SEO you should add ‘301 redirections’ to reassign all links that were set up using the previous permalinks structure to web addresses that use the new permalink syntax.

Search engines interpret a ’301′ code as a link that has been permanently relocated. 301 redirects are the most efficient and search engine friendly way to redirect users to new website destinations and avoid page errors when following an old link.

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

You can add a link redirection system to your do this using a plugin 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 301 redirects using plugins or get professional help)

Congratulations! Now you know how to set up your blog’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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