Wouldn’t it be great if after publishing new content on your website, the following happened … just from your page address:

• Users could easily assess what your content was about,
• Search engines could easily discover your pages and correctly index their content for better search rankings,
• Each item of content created on your website would have its own unique ID, making your content easier to manage.

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

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – Definition

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

A permalink is the web address that visitors and search engines will use to link to your articles or sections of your site or the links you send in emails pointing to a particular post on your blog. Permalinks are also referred to as “pretty” URLs.

Permalinks make the URLs to each post on your website permanent, hence a permalink.

Permalinks – Why Do You Need To Use Them?

Hopefully, you are probably aware by now that, WordPress is one of the best CMS tools available when it comes to publishing search engines optimized content.

WordPress is not only great for SEO out of the box, but its SEO aspect can be considerably fine tuned 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 structure of a site’s URLs when indexing content.

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

Now … let’s turn our attention to the reason why you may need to set up permalinks if publishing content in WordPress.

Typically, a default WordPress installation uses a URL 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 its database. It doesn’t really mean anything to search engines or visitors, and it doesn’t help your site with on-site search engine optimization.

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

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

To get the maximum SEO benefit out of using and improve your site’s rankings, you will want to make sure to 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 the ability to create a custom URL structure for your published posts, so your pages can go from something that is non-SEO friendly like this …

To something like this …

In this tutorial, you will learn how to set up the Permalinks section of your WordPress site to display posts with search engine-friendly URLs instead of the default URL structure and help every new post you add to your site or blog automatically get better indexing in Google.

How To Set Up Your WordPress Permalinks

Log into your WP admin and click on Settings > Permalinks …

This brings 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 “pretty” permalinks instead for our posts. To do this, we 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 …

(Set up your permalink settings to create search engine-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/seven-favourite-european-river-cruises

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=7418

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

WordPress Permalink Tags

“Pretty” permalinks, or search engine-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% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘06’)
• %day% – The day the post gets published (e.g. ‘08’)
• %hour% – The hour the post is published (e.g. ‘23’)
• %minute% – The minute the post is published (e.g. ‘33’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘59’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘8491’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of your post title. For example, if your post title is ”Ten Best Hotels In Cote D’Azur!”, the postname tag will convert this into “ten-best-hotels-in-cote-dazur” (all lower case letters and removed punctuation symbols) in the URL. Tip: You can edit the words 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 selecting the ‘Custom Structure’ setting and adding the /%postname%/ tag.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

If you need to configure custom permalinks for your category and tag URLs here is where you would do this.

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

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

For example, changing your category base to “recipes” will make your category links display as ‘http://domain.com/recipes/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 something like this …

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

Remember to save any 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 – Additional Notes

Use Descriptive 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 a few things to keep in mind if you are wondering whether or not to add categories to your permalinks:

• If your category name is short and descriptive (e.g. uses a relevant keyword or keyword phrase), you may want to add the category tag 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 is no ideal permalink structure to use. Choose the permalink structure you think will suit your site best. Many SEO experts recommend making your post URLs short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We cover WordPress categories in other articles.

Avoid Time-Specific Permalinks

Another great tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your website provides news or time-specific information, or you have any special reason to create dated post addresses, avoid selecting date-based permalink settings when configuring your site’s URLs.

(Avoid using permalinks that date your content)

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

What If My Site Has Content?

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

If your website or blog has been running for a while or you have a lot of content already indexed in the search engines and you would like to change the permalink structure, make sure that this is something that absolutely needs doing, as changing permalinks after your site has been running for a while can create issues and errors.

301 Redirection

As you’ve seen earlier, many website owners (or whoever set up their site) seem to be unaware of the permalinks 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. Maybe your website was originally set up 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 permalinks.

The best way to change your permalinks without negatively impacting your site’s SEO or existing rankings is to use ‘301 redirections’ to point all links set up using the previous permalink structure to post URLs using the new permalinks structure.

Search engines interpret a code ‘301’ as a link that has permanently moved to another location. 301 redirects are the most efficient and search engine friendly way to redirect users to new website destinations and avoid running into ”page not found” errors if they click on an old link.

To create an effective permalink syntax change and avoid damaging your rankings, sending visitors to error pages, etc. you will need to set up 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 WP redirection plugin 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 get professional help)

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

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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