Wouldn’t it be great if you could publish a new post on your WordPress website or blog, and the following happened … just from your post URL:

• Site readers could determine what your post is about,
• Google would easily discover your pages and correctly classify their content for better search results,
• Every content item on your website would have its own unique identifier, making things easier to manage.

Well, with permalinks you can!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – Definition

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

A permalink is the web address that others use to link to articles or sections of your site or the links you send in emails pointing readers to a particular item of content on your site. Some people also call permalinks “pretty” URLs.

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

Why Use Permalinks?

As you probably know, WordPress is one of the best Content Management Systems you can use when it comes to SEO.

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

If you focus on the SEO aspect of your site or blog, then you cannot ignore the importance of your site’s URLs. Google places considerable weight on the structure of URLs when indexing its content.

Permalinks can be used to turn links on your site into “prettier” 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 when publishing content in WordPress.

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

The link structure shown above is used by WordPress to locate information inside its database. It doesn’t really mean much to anyone, and it doesn’t help your site with on-site SEO.

As you can see from the screenshot below taken from Google search listings, many WordPress users haven’t yet configured their permalinks …

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

To get optimal SEO benefit out of using and improve your site’s rankings, you will want to make sure to configure your permalinks structure to make it more search engine-friendly by displaying relevant keywords in your URL, instead of meaningless characters.

WordPress lets you create a custom URL structure for your published and archived posts, so your content can easily go from something that is non-SEO friendly like this …

To something with an SEO-friendly URL like this …

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

Configuring WordPress Permalinks

In your WordPress dashboard 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 will need to specify a different Permalink structure than the default.

Common Permalink Settings

In the Common Settings section, select Custom Structure, then add one or more ‘tags’ (see below) to create search engine-friendly URLs …

(Change 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-europe/romantic-european-cruise-destinations

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=7965

(Using post name permalinks helps visitors understand what the page is about)

SEO-Friendly 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% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘04’)
• %day% – The day the post is published (e.g. ‘19’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘16’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘35’)
• %second% – The exact second the post gets published (e.g. ‘34’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘7240’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted version of your post title. For example, if the post title is “Top Five Budget Travel Tips!”, the postname tag will convert this into “top-five-budget-travel-tips” (all characters converted to lower case and exclamation symbols deleted) 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 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 choosing ‘Custom Structure’ and using the /%postname%/ tag.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

In this section, you can configure custom structures for your category and tag archive page URLs.

You can change the ‘base’ category or tag of your URLs using the following structure:

• domain.com/category_base/category_name
• domain.com/tag_base/tag_name

For example, using “travel” as your category base will display your category links as ‘http://domain.com/travel/category_name/’.

So, if you enter the following in your permalinks Optional > Category base settings section …

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

To this …

If you leave the 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 – Tips

Use Short, Descriptive Categories

To get the maximum 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 some points to consider if you are wondering whether you should add categories to your permalinks or not:

• If your domain is short and your category 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 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.

Ultimately, when it comes to using 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 Date-Based Permalink Syntax

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

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

People are less likely to click on posts that are several years old, even if the content is relevant to what they are searching for.

Changing Permalinks In Site With Published Posts

Normally, it’s best to configure your site’s permalinks when you perform a new WordPress installation. This should be part of your website planning process.

If your website or blog is already established or your site already has a lot of content 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 can create SEO issues and loss of traffic.

301 Redirects

As you’ve seen earlier, some WordPress site owners (or whoever set up their site) are completely unaware of the permalinks feature of WordPress.

Maybe when you started out, your site used the default WordPress permalinks and now you would like to improve your site’s SEO. Maybe your website was configured to display post dates in your URLs and now all of your content is perceived as being outdated and you want to delete the date portion of the URLs.

The best way to modify your URL structure without impacting your site’s SEO in a negative way is to use ‘301 redirects’ to point links set up using the old URL structure to URLs using the new structure.

Search engines interpret a code ‘301’ as a link that has permanently moved elsewhere. 301 redirection is the most efficient and search engine friendly way to redirect visitors to new website destinations and avoid ‘404’ (Page not found) errors if following an old link.

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

You can add a link redirection system to your 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 any 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

***