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

• Users could quickly determine what your content is about,
• Google would be able to find your posts faster,
• Every post published on your site would have a unique identifier, making your site easier to manage.

Well, this is what a WordPress permalink lets you do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – What Are They?

Permalinks are the permanent URLs to your individual WordPress posts, categories and other taxonomies (a way to group things together) like archives.

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

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

Permalinks – Why Use Them?

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

WordPress is not only well optimized right out of the box, but its SEO aspect can be further finetuned with SEO plugins.

If you focus on the SEO aspect of your site, then you should not ignore the importance of your URLs. Search engines like Google tend to give special significance to the URL structure of your site.

Permalinks are used to make the links on your site into memorable and more “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 why it’s best to configure your permalinks if publishing content in WordPress.

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

WordPress uses the link structure shown above to find data within its database. It doesn’t really mean much to anyone, and it doesn’t help your website with on-site SEO.

As the screenshot below shows, many site owners haven’t yet set up their permalinks …

Although Google is still indexing the above sites, these 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 SEO-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 something like this …

Out of the box, WordPress URLs are not very search engine-friendly. In this tutorial, you will learn how to set up your permalinks in WordPress to display your posts with search engine-friendly URLs.

Setting Up Your WordPress Permalinks

In your WordPress admin 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 a search engine friendly URL instead for our posts. To do this, we will need to specify a different Permalink structure than the one set by default.

Permalinks > Common Settings

In the Common Settings section, select Custom Structure, then add one or more ‘tags’ (see below) to create SEO-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/budget-travel/romantic-cruise-holiday-deals

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=7720

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

Pretty URL Tags

“Pretty” permalinks, or search engine-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. ‘2011’)
• %monthnum% – The month your post is published (e.g. ‘10’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘05’)
• %hour% – The hour your post is published (e.g. ‘05’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘33’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘22’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘8598’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted version of the post title. For example, if your post title is ”It Ain’t Worth Doin’ No More!”, the postname tag will convert this into “it-aint-worth-doin-no-more” (all lower case letters and removed 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 selecting ‘Custom Structure’ and adding the /%postname%/ tag.

Optional Permalink Settings

Here you can set up custom structures for your tag and category archive page URLs.

You can change the ‘base’ tag or category of 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/uncategorized/’.

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

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

To this …

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

Remember to save any changes when you are 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 Information

Set Up Categories

To get the best possible benefit out of using Permalinks, you will need 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 plugin developer Joost de Valk, here are a few things to consider if you are wondering whether you should add categories to your permalink structure or not:

• If your domain is short and your category name is short and descriptive (e.g. adds a relevant keyword or keyword phrase to your URL), 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 and decrease the SEO benefit.
• If you plan to post content under multiple categories, then we recommend not using the category tag in your permalink structure.

Ultimately, when it comes to using category vs no category there really is no ideal permalink structure to use. Use a permalink structure that you think will suit your site best. Many SEO experts and webmasters recommend making your post URLs short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We provide detailed information about WordPress categories in another tutorial.

Avoid Using Time-Stamping Permalink Syntax

Another great tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your website is a news blog or you have any special reason to add dates to your URLs, it’s best to avoid selecting date-based permalinks when configuring your blog’s URLs.

(Avoid setting up permalinks that time-stamp your content)

Although using URL structures that date your content 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 About Changing Permalinks In Blogs With Published Posts?

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

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

301 Redirects

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

Maybe when you started out, your site used the default WordPress URL structure and now you would like to improve your SEO. Maybe your site was configured to display post dates in your URLs and now all of your posts are showing as being two or three years old and you want to delete the date portion of your URLs.

To change your permalink structure without affecting your site’s SEO in a negative way you should add ‘301 redirects’ to point all links that use the previous URL structure to destinations that use the new permalinks syntax.

Search engines interpret a ’301′ code as a link that has permanently relocated to another address. 301 redirection is the most efficient and search engine friendly way to redirect visitors to new website destinations and avoid running into page errors when following an old link.

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

You can add a link redirection system to your do this using a WordPress 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 issues and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up link redirections using redirection plugins or get professional help)

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, see the WordPress codex below:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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