Wouldn’t it be great if you could simply publish a new page on your website or blog, and the following would then happen … just from your web address:

• Site readers could assess what the post was about,
• Search engines could discover your posts faster,
• Every post created on your website or blog would have its own unique ID, making things easier to manage.

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

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

What Are Permalinks?

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 posts or sections of your site or the links you send in an email pointing to content items on your website. Some people also call permalinks “pretty” URLs.

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

Permalinks – Why Do You Need To Use Them?

As you probably know, WordPress is one of the best CMS applications available when it comes to SEO.

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

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

Permalinks can be used to make the 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 take a look at why you may need to configure your permalinks when publishing content in WordPress.

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

The link structure shown above is used by WordPress to find information within your database. It does not help your site with on-site search engine optimization.

As the screenshot from Google search listings below shows, many site owners haven’t set up their permalinks to publish search optimized content online …

Although these sites are getting their content indexed on search engines, they are potentially missing out on extra SEO benefits.

To get the greatest SEO benefit from using and improve your site’s traffic results, you will want to make sure to configure 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 and archived posts, so your content can go from something that is non-SEO friendly like this …

To this …

In this step-by-step tutorial, you will learn how to configure your WordPress permalinks to display posts using SEO-friendly URLs instead of the out-of-the-box URL structure and help every new post you publish automatically get better indexing results in search engines.

Setting Up Your WordPress Permalinks

In your WordPress administration area click on, 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 “pretty” permalink instead for our posts. To do this, we will need to specify a different Permalink structure than the default one.

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 …

(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/travel-tips/how-to-save-money-on-cruise-travel

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=2534

(Using permalinks helps readers understand what the content is about)

WordPress 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. ‘2014’)
• %monthnum% – The month your post gets published (e.g. ‘12’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘22’)
• %hour% – The hour the post gets published (e.g. ‘10’)
• %minute% – The minute your post is published (e.g. ‘54’)
• %second% – The exact second your post is published (e.g. ‘47’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘8582’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of your post title. For example, if the post title is ”The Five Don’ts Of DIY Home Repair!”, the postname tag will convert this into “the-five-donts-of-diy-home-repair” (all lower case letters and no punctuation symbols) in the URL. Tip: You can edit this 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 sanitized 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 using the /%postname%/ tag.

Optional Permalink Settings

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

You can change the ‘base’ category or tag 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 make your category links display as ‘http://domain.com/news/category_name/’.

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

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

To this …

If you leave these fields blank the defaults 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 – Tips

Categories

To get more SEO benefit from 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 some points to consider if you are wondering whether you should add categories to your permalinks or not:

• If your category is short and descriptive (e.g. adds a relevant keyword or keyword phrase to your URL), you may want to add categories 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 we recommend not using the category tag in your permalink structure.

Ultimately, when it comes to using category vs no category there is no ”better” permalink structure to use. Choose a permalink structure you think will suit your needs best. SEO experts recommend making your web address short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We provide detailed information about WordPress categories in other tutorials.

Don’t Use Date Permalinks

Another great tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your site provides news, or there is a special reason why you need to add dates to your URLs, it’s best to avoid using date-based permalink options when configuring your URLs.

(Avoid using URL structures that time-stamp your content)

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

What If My Blog Has Content?

Normally, your site’s permalinks should be set up when you first install WordPress. 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 want to change the permalink structure, make sure that this is something that absolutely needs doing, as doing so could create SEO issues and errors.

Add 301 Redirection

As you’ve seen earlier, many WordPress site owners (or their web developers) are unaware of the search-friendly URLs feature of WordPress.

Maybe you started out using the default WordPress permalinks and now you would like to improve your site’s SEO. Perhaps your website or blog was configured to display post dates in your URLs and now all of your content is showing as being two or three years old and you want to delete the date portion in the permalinks.

The best way to modify your permalink structure without negatively impacting your site’s SEO or rankings is to add ‘301 redirections’ to reassign links set up using the previous permalinks syntax to page URLs using the new syntax.

Search engines interpret a ’301′ code as a link that has permanently relocated to another address. 301 redirects are the most efficient and search engine friendly way to redirect visitors to new web page destinations and avoid ‘404’ (Page not found) errors when clicking on an old link.

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

You can WordPress site or blog using redirection plugins 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 link redirections using plugins or get professional assistance)

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 official WordPress documentation below:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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