Wouldn’t it be great if after adding new content to your WordPress website or blog, the following happened … just from your page URL:

• Potential visitors to your site could easily glean what your post is about,
• Google would be able to easily discover your post and correctly index your content for better search rankings,
• Every piece of content added to your website or blog would have its own unique ID, 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 – Definition

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

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

Permalinks make the URLs to each post on your blog permanent, hence a perma-link.

Permalinks – Why Use Them?

Hopefully, you are probably aware by now that, WordPress is one of the best Content Management Systems available when it comes to publishing search engines optimized content.

WordPress is not only great for SEO out of the box, but there are excellent SEO plugins you can use that will help to enhance its SEO aspect further.

If you are looking to optimize the SEO aspect of your website, then you should not ignore the importance of your URLs. Search engines like Google place considerable weight on the structure of your site’s URLs when indexing its pages.

Permalinks can be used to make the links on your site into “prettier” and more “search engine friendly” URLs. Permalinks also improve the aesthetics, usability, and forward-compatibility of your links.

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

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

WordPress uses the above link with a string query to find information within its database. It does not help your website with on-site search engine optimization.

As you can see from the image below taken from Google search results, many site owners haven’t set up their permalinks …

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

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

WordPress allows you to create a custom URL structure for your published posts, so your pages can easily go from something that is non-SEO friendly like this …

To something with an SEO-friendly URL like this …

By default, WordPress post URLs are not very search engine-friendly. This tutorial explains how to set up your WP permalinks to automatically get better indexing results in search engines.

Changing WordPress Permalinks

From your WordPress admin menu, select Settings > Permalinks …

This will bring 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 “pretty” permalink instead for our posts. To do this, we need to specify a different Permalink structure than the default one.

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 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/europe-travel/how-to-save-money-on-cruise-travel

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=2353

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

How To Create Search Engine-Friendly Tags In WordPress

“Pretty” URLs, or search engine-friendly URLs, are created by adding one or more ‘tags’ in the Custom Structure field:

• %year% – The year the post gets published, four digits (e.g. ‘2012’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘11’)
• %day% – The day the post is published (e.g. ‘05’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘21’)
• %minute% – The minute the post is published (e.g. ‘08’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘16’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘3368’)
• %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 letters converted to lower case and no exclamation symbols) in the URL. Tip: You can edit the URL 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 choosing ‘Custom Structure’ and adding the /%postname%/ tag.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

If you need to configure custom permalinks for your tag and category archive pages you can do this in this section.

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

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

For example, changing your category base to “topics” would make your category links display as ‘http://domain.com/topics/uncategorized/’.

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

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

To something like this …

If you leave these fields blank the default settings will be used.

Remember to save any changes after 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 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 plugin developer Joost de Valk, here are a few things to keep in mind if you are wondering whether you should add categories to your permalinks or not:

• If 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 share and decrease the SEO benefit.
• If you are going to post content under multiple categories, then we recommend not using the category tag in your permalink structure.

Ultimately, when it comes to adding category vs no category there is no ideal permalink structure to use. We recommend choosing the permalink structure you think will suit your needs best and that will make your site’s web addresses short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We provide more information about WordPress categories in another tutorial.

Create Timeless Posts

Another tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your website is a news site or there is a special reason why you need to create dated website URLs, it’s best to avoid selecting date-based permalink settings for your URLs.

(Avoid using permalinks that time-stamp your posts)

Although setting up URL structures that date your content is better that using no permalinks at all from an SEO perspective, 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.

What About An Established Blog?

Normally, it’s best to configure your permalinks when you first install WordPress. This should be part of your site planning process.

If your website is already established or your site already has a lot of 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 doing so could create issues and errors.

Use 301 Redirection

As you’ve seen earlier, many WordPress site owners (or whoever set up their site) seem to be 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 or blog was configured to display post dates in your URLs and now all of your content is perceived as being outdated and you want to remove the date portion of the permalinks.

To modify your URL structure without affecting your site’s SEO or rankings in a negative way you will need to use ‘301 redirections’ to reassign links set up using the previous URL structure to destinations that use the new permalinks syntax.

Search engines interpret a ’301′ code as a link that has permanently moved elsewhere. 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 if following an old link.

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

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

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

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. For additional information on using Permalinks, see the official WordPress documentation here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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