Wouldn’t it be great if you could simply publish new content on your website, and the following would then take place … all from your web address:

• Users could assess what your content was about,
• Google would easily discover your post and correctly classify your content for better search rankings,
• Every single content item on your website would have its own unique identifier, making your content easier to manage.

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

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalink – What Is It?

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

A permalink is the URL that others use to link to your articles or sections of your site or the links you send in an email pointing readers to your posts. Some people refer to permalinks as “pretty” URLs.

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

Why Use Permalinks?

As you probably know, WordPress is one of the best CMS applications you can use when it comes to publishing search engines optimized content.

WordPress is not only well optimized straight out of the box, but its SEO aspect can be easily fine tuned using excellent SEO plugins.

If you are looking to optimize the SEO aspect of your website, then you cannot ignore the importance of your URLs. Search engines like Google place considerable weight on the structure of URLs when indexing content.

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 review why you should use permalinks in WordPress.

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

WordPress uses the above link structure to find information within your database. It does not help your site with on-site SEO.

As the screenshot image below shows, many WordPress site owners are still using out-of-the-box settings when publishing content …

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

To get greater SEO benefit from using WordPress and improve your site’s traffic results, you should 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 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 default URL structure and help every new post you add to your site or blog automatically get better indexing results in Google.

How To Set Up Your WordPress Permalinks

Log into your WP dashboard and select 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 will need to specify a different Permalink structure than the one set by default.

Common Permalink 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 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/cruise-holiday-deals

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=8678

(Using permalinks helps readers understand what your post is about)

Creating Pretty WordPress URLs

“Pretty” URLs, 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% – The month the post gets published (e.g. ‘04’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘31’)
• %hour% – The hour the post is published (e.g. ‘23’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘15’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘40’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘9619’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted version of the post title. For example, if your post title is ”Ten Signs That You’re About To Get Fired From Your Job!”, the postname tag will convert this into “ten-signs-that-youre-about-to-get-fired-from-your-job” (all lower case characters and exclamation symbols removed) in the URL. Tip: You can 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 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 choosing ‘Custom Structure’ and adding the /%postname%/ tag.

Optional Permalink Settings

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

This changes the ‘base’ tag or category 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” would display your category links as ‘http://domain.com/recipes/category_name/’.

So, if you make the following change in your permalinks Optional > Category base settings field …

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

To this …

If you leave these fields blank WordPress uses the defaults.

Remember to save your changes when 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

Use Descriptive Categories

To get greater benefit out of 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 a few things to consider if you are wondering whether or not to add categories to your permalinks:

• If your domain is short and your category slug is short and descriptive (e.g. adds a relevant keyword or keyword phrase to your URL), 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 and reduce 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 category vs no category there really is no perfect permalink structure to use. Use the permalink structure that you think will suit your site best. SEO experts recommend making your post URLs short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We provide more information about WordPress categories in another tutorial.

Avoid Using URL Syntaxes That Time-Stamp Your Content

Another tip from Joost de Valk is that unless you run a news site or you have a special reason to add dates to your URLs, it’s best to avoid using date-based permalink syntax when setting up your URLs.

(Avoid setting up URL structures that time-stamp your posts)

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.

Changing Permalinks In Blog With Published Content

Normally, your site’s permalinks should be configured when you perform a new WordPress installation. This should be part of your website 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 doing so can create SEO issues and errors.

Add 301 Redirection

As you’ve seen earlier, many site owners (or their web developers) are unaware of the search-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. Perhaps your website was originally set up to display post dates in your URLs and now all of your content is perceived as being out-of-date and you want to delete the date portion of the URLs.

To modify your URL structure without affecting your site’s SEO or existing rankings in a negative way you should add ‘301 redirections’ to reassign all links using the old URL structure to page URLs that use the new structure.

Search engines interpret a code ‘301’ as a link that has permanently moved elsewhere. 301 redirects are the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect users to new site destinations and avoid page errors when they click on an old link.

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

You can WP site using 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 a redirection system using redirection 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, refer to the WordPress codex here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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