Wouldn’t it be great if you could publish content on your website, and the following took place … all from your post address:

• Visitors could assess what the content is about,
• Search engines would be able to easily discover your post and correctly index the content for better search rankings,
• Every single post published on your site would have its own unique ID, making things easier to manage.

Well, with permalinks this can easily be done!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalink – What Is It?

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 others use to link to your articles or sections of your site or the links you send in an email pointing readers to a specific item of content on your website. Some people refer to permalinks as “pretty” URLs.

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

Permalinks – Why Do We Need To Use Them?

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

WordPress is not only great for SEO out of the box, but the SEO aspect can be further enhanced using excellent SEO plugins.

If you are looking to optimize the SEO aspect of your site or blog, then you cannot ignore the importance of your site’s 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 “search engine friendly” URLs. Permalinks can also improve the usability, aesthetics, and forward-compatibility of your links.

Now … let’s turn our attention to the reason why it’s best to configure your permalinks when publishing content in WordPress.

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

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

As you can see from the screenshot image below taken directly from Google search listings, many site owners haven’t yet set up their sites to publish search optimized content …

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

To get more SEO benefit from using WordPress and improve your site’s traffic results, you should configure your permalinks structure to make it more search engine-friendly by displaying relevant keywords in your URL, instead of meaningless characters.

WordPress offers you the ability to create a custom URL structure for your published posts, so your content can easily go from this …

To something with an SEO-friendly URL like this …

In this step-by-step tutorial, you will learn how to set up the Permalinks section of your WordPress site to display your posts using search engine-friendly URLs instead of the default linking structure and help every new post you add get better indexing results in search engines like Google.

Changing WordPress Permalinks

Log into your WordPress admin area and click on Settings > Permalinks …

This will bring 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 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 …

(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/budget-cruises/how-to-save-money-on-cruise-travel

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=625

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

Creating Permalink 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. ‘2012’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘01’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘22’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘20’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘58’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘57’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘7235’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted version of your post title. For example, if your 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 punctuation symbols deleted) in the URL. Tip: You can 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 adding the /%postname%/ tag in ‘Custom Structure’.

Optional Permalink Settings

If you need to set up custom structures for your tag and category pages you can do this in this section.

This changes the ‘base’ category or tag URLs using the following syntax:

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

For example, using “news” as your category base will display your category links 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 something like this …

If you leave these fields blank the defaults will be used.

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

Categories

To get greater 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 plugin developer Joost de Valk, here are some points to keep in mind if you are wondering whether or not to add categories to your permalink structure:

• 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 the category tag 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 or copy and decrease the SEO benefit.
• If you are going 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 is no ”better” permalink structure to use. Choose the permalink structure you think will suit your site best. Your web address should be short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We provide more information about WordPress categories in other tutorials.

Make Your Posts Timeless

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

(Avoid using permalinks 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 Blog With Published Content

Normally, your permalinks should be set up when you perform a new WordPress installation. This should be part of your site planning process.

If your site is already established 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 changing permalinks after your site has been running for a while could create issues and errors.

301 Redirection

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

Maybe you started out using the default WordPress permalinks and now you want to optimize your site better for search engines. Maybe your website or blog was configured to display post dates in your URLs and now all of your posts are showing as being 2-3 years old and you want to delete the date portion of your URLs.

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

Search engines interpret a code ‘301’ as a link that has been permanently moved to another destination. 301 redirects are the most efficient and search engine friendly way to redirect users to new site destinations and avoid running into ”page not found” errors when they click on an old link.

To create an effective syntax change and avoid damaging your search rankings, sending visitors to error pages, etc. you should add your redirection system before changing the permalink structure of your site.

You can WordPress site or blog using a redirection plugin like Simple 301 Redirects, or Redirection, or use the services of a professional to help you set up and redirect your permalinks correctly to avoid any issues and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up 301 redirections using redirection plugins or get professional assistance)

Congratulations! Now you know how to set up your permalinks to display SEO-friendly URLs for your posts and improve your search results. For additional information on using Permalinks, refer to the WordPress codex here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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