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

• Visitors could assess what your post is about,
• Search engines would be able to easily discover your pages and correctly classify their content to improve your search rankings,
• Every single post created on your website would have its own unique ID, making your site easier to manage.

Well, with permalinks you can easily do this!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

What’s 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 others will use to link to posts or sections of your site or the links you send in emails pointing readers to posts on your site. Some people also call permalinks “pretty” URLs.

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

Why Do You Need To Use Permalinks?

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

WordPress is not only great for SEO out of the box, but there are excellent SEO plugins you can install that can further help to fine tuned its SEO aspect.

If you are looking to optimize the SEO aspect of your website, then you should not 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 are used to turn links on your site into memorable and more “search engine friendly” URLs. Permalinks can also improve the aesthetics, usability, and forward-compatibility of your links.

Now … let’s see why you may need to set up permalinks when 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 …

WordPress uses the above link with a string query to locate information within its database. It doesn’t really mean much to anyone, and it doesn’t help your site with on-site search engine optimization.

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

Although these sites are still getting their content indexed on search engines, many site owners are potentially missing out on additional SEO benefits.

To get the most SEO benefit from using and improve your site’s rankings, you will want to make sure to set up your permalinks structure to make it more search engine-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 and archived posts, so your content can easily go from this …

To something like this …

In this 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 linking structure and help every new post you add automatically get better indexing results in search engines.

Configuring Your WordPress Permalinks

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

Permalinks > Common Settings

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 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-deals/top-ten-european-cruise-destinations

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=2353

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

Pretty URL Tags

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

• %year% – The year your post is published, displayed as four digits (e.g. ‘2011’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘11’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘11’)
• %hour% – The hour your post gets published (e.g. ‘15’)
• %minute% – The minute the post is published (e.g. ‘50’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘24’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘4233’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of your post title. For example, if the post title is ”Ten Best Hotels In Cote D’Azur!”, the postname tag will convert this into “ten-best-hotels-in-cote-dazur” (all characters converted to lower case and no punctuation marks) in the URL. Tip: You can always edit the URL 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 selecting the ‘Custom Structure’ setting and using the /%postname%/ tag.

Optional Permalink Settings

This section lets you set up custom structures for your tag and category page URLs.

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 “travel” will make your category links display 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 change from this …

To something like this …

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

Remember to save any 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 – Additional Info

Set Up Categories

To get the optimal 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, 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 consider 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 copy or share 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.

Despite being the subject of intense debate in WordPress SEO circles, when it comes to adding category vs no category there is no perfect permalink structure to use. Choose a 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 cover WordPress categories in other articles.

Create Timeless Posts

Another tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your site provides news, or there is a special reason why you need to date your site’s content, avoid choosing date-based permalink syntax when configuring your blog’s URLs.

(Avoid using permalinks that date your content)

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

What About Changing Permalinks In Blogs With Indexed Posts?

Normally, it’s best to configure your site’s permalinks when you create a new WordPress site. 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 absolutely something that needs doing, as doing so can create issues and loss of traffic.

301 Redirects

As you’ve seen in the above screenshots of actual search results, some WordPress users (or their web developers) are completely 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. Maybe your website was originally set up to display post dates in your URLs and now all of your content is perceived as being outdated and you want to remove the date portion in the permalinks.

The best way to change your permalink structure without affecting your site’s SEO or rankings in a negative way is to add ‘301 redirections’ to point links that use the old permalink syntax to links using the new permalinks structure.

Search engines interpret a ’301′ code as a link that has permanently been moved 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 when they click on an old link.

To effectively change your syntax and avoid damaging your rankings, sending visitors to error pages, etc. you will need to configure a redirection system before messing with the permalink structure of your site.

You can site or blog using a WP plugin like Simple 301 Redirects, or Redirection, or get a professional to help you set up and redirect your permalinks correctly to avoid problems and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up 301 redirections 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. For additional information on using Permalinks, see the WordPress codex below:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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