Wouldn’t it be great if after adding new content to your website or blog, the following could take place … all from your page address:

• Potential visitors could quickly tell what your page is about,
• Search engines would be able to easily find your posts and correctly index their content to improve your search results,
• Each post you create on your website would have a unique ID, making things easier to manage.

Well, with WordPress permalinks this can easily be done!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

What Is A Permalink?

A permalink is the permanent URL to your individual posts, categories and other taxonomies (a way to organize things together) like archives.

A permalink is the web address that other people will use to link to your posts or sections of your site or the links you send in an email pointing to your posts. Permalinks are sometimes referred to as “pretty” URLs.

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

Why Do You Need To Use Permalinks?

As you probably know, WordPress is one of the best Content Management Systems available when it comes to publishing search engines optimized content.

WordPress is not only well optimized straight out of the box, but there are excellent SEO plugins you can use that will help to finetune its SEO aspect considerably.

If you are looking to optimize the SEO aspect of your site, then you cannot ignore the importance of its URLs. Google tends to pay special attention to the structure of URLs when indexing its pages.

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

Now … let’s take a look at the reason why you should set up permalinks in WordPress.

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

WordPress uses the above link structure with a string query to locate data inside your database. It does not mean anything to visitors or search engines, and it doesn’t help your site with on-site SEO.

As you can see from the screenshot image below taken directly from Google search results, many WordPress users haven’t yet set up their sites to use permalinks …

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

To get the greatest SEO benefit from using and improve your site’s traffic results, you should set up your permalinks structure to make it more SEO-friendly by displaying relevant keywords in your URL, instead of meaningless numbers and symbols.

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

To something like this …

In this step-by-step 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 out-of-the-box linking structure and help every new post you add to your site automatically get better indexing in search engines.

Changing Your WordPress Permalinks

Log into your WP admin area 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 search engine friendly URLs instead for our posts. To do this, we need to specify a different Permalink structure than the default one.

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

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=8097

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

How To Create Permalink Tags In WordPress

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

• %year% – The year the post gets published, four digits (e.g. ‘2012’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘12’)
• %day% – The day the post gets published (e.g. ‘31’)
• %hour% – The hour your post is published (e.g. ‘05’)
• %minute% – The minute your post is published (e.g. ‘14’)
• %second% – The exact second your post gets published (e.g. ‘56’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘1428’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of your post title. For example, if your post title is “Top Five Budget Travel Tips!”, the postname tag will convert this into “top-five-budget-travel-tips” (all lower case letters and no punctuation symbols) in the URL. Tip: You can always edit the URL text 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 adding the /%postname%/ tag in the ‘Custom Structure’ option.

Optional Permalink Settings

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

This changes the ‘base’ category or tag 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 “news” will display your category links as ‘http://domain.com/news/uncategorized/’.

So, if you add the following to your permalinks Optional > Category base settings section …

Your ‘category archives’ page URL will change from looking like this …

To something like this …

If you leave these 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 – Tips

Use Descriptive Categories

To get the greatest benefit from using Permalinks, remember 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 and author of the WordPress SEO plugin Joost de Valk, here are some points 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 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 or share and decrease 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.

Ultimately, when it comes to adding category vs no category there really 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 web address short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We cover WordPress categories in another article.

Avoid Setting Up Permalinks That Date Your Posts

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

(Avoid using permalinks that time-stamp your content)

Although setting up URL structures that date your content is better that using no permalinks at all from an SEO point-of-view, visitors 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 Already Has Lots Of Indexed Content?

Normally, it’s best to set up your site’s permalinks when you create a new WordPress site. This should be part of your site planning process.

If your site has been running for a while or your site already has many posts 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 been going for a while can create SEO issues and errors.

Use 301 Redirection

As you’ve seen earlier, some WordPress site owners (or their web developers) are unaware of the permalinks feature of WordPress.

Maybe you started out using the default WordPress permalinks and now you would like to optimize your site better for search engines. Perhaps your website or blog was configured to display post dates in your web address 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 permalinks.

The best way to modify your permalink structure without affecting your site’s SEO or existing rankings in a negative way is to add ‘301 redirects’ to reassign links set up using the previous permalink structure to web addresses that use the new syntax.

A ’301′ code is interpreted by search engines as a link that has permanently been relocated to another destination. 301 redirection is the most efficient and search engine friendly way to redirect visitors to new web page destinations and avoid page errors if clicking on an old link.

To effectively change your permalink syntax and avoid SEO problems, sending visitors to broken links, etc. you will need to configure your redirection system before changing the permalink structure of your site.

You can site using a redirection 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 URL redirections using plugins or use the services of a professional)

Congratulations! Now you know about the built-in system WordPress uses to display search engine-friendly URLs for your posts and improve your search search rankings. To learn more about using Permalinks, refer to the official WordPress documentation here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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