Wouldn’t it be great if after adding new content to your website or blog, the following could take place … all from your page address:

• Potential site visitors could easily understand what your content is about,
• Search engines could easily discover your page and correctly index the content to improve your search results,
• Every content item created on your website would have a unique ID, 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 your individual WordPress posts, categories and other taxonomies (a way to group things together) like archives.

A permalink is the URL that others will use to link to your posts or sections of your site or the links you send in emails pointing to a particular post on your blog. Permalinks are also referred to as “pretty” URLs.

Permalinks make the URLs to each post on your website permanent, hence a permalink.

Permalinks – Why Do I Need To Use Them?

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

WordPress is not only well optimized straight out of the box, but there are excellent SEO plugins you can install that can help to enhance its SEO aspect.

If you are looking to optimize the SEO aspect of your site or blog, then you should not ignore the importance of your URLs. Search engines like Google place considerable weight on the URL structure of your site.

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

Now … let’s take a look at why you should set up permalinks in WordPress.

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

WordPress uses the link structure shown above to locate data within its database. It does not mean much to anyone, and it doesn’t help your site with on-site SEO.

As the screenshot taken from Google search listings below shows, many WordPress users haven’t configured their sites to publish search optimized content online …

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

To get more SEO benefit out of using WordPress and improve your site’s rankings, you will want to make sure to set up your permalinks structure to make it more search engine-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 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 posts with SEO-friendly URLs instead of the out-of-the-box URL structure and help every new post you add get better indexing in Google.

How To Set Up Your WordPress Permalinks

Log into your WordPress dashboard and click on 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 “pretty” permalinks instead for our posts. To do this, we need to specify a different Permalink structure than the default one.

Common Settings

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

(Set up 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=6111

(Using permalinks helps search engines and visitors understand what the page is about)

Search Engine-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 your post is published, four digits (e.g. ‘2013’)
• %monthnum% – The month the post gets published (e.g. ‘06’)
• %day% – The day your post gets published (e.g. ‘28’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘24’)
• %minute% – The minute the post is published (e.g. ‘22’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘56’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘4402’)
• %postname% – A sanitized 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 letters converted to lower case and no exclamation symbols) in the URL. Tip: You can always 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 adding the /%postname%/ tag in ‘Custom Structure’.

Optional Permalink Settings

Here you can enter custom structures for your tag and category archive pages.

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

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

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

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

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

To this …

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

Remember to save any 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 maximum SEO benefit from 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 Joost de Valk, here are some things to keep in mind if you are wondering whether you should add categories to your permalinks or not:

• If your domain is short and your category name is short and descriptive (e.g. uses a relevant keyword or keyword phrase), 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 and decrease the SEO benefit.
• Do you plan to post content under only one category or multiple categories? 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 adding category vs no category there really is no ”better” permalink structure to use. Use the permalink structure 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 cover WordPress categories in other articles.

Make Your Posts Timeless

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

(Avoid using URL structures that date your content)

Although setting up permalinks that date your posts is better that using no permalinks at all from an SEO aspect, people are less likely to click on posts that are several years old, even if the content is relevant to the answers they are searching for.

Changing Permalinks In Site With Published Posts

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

If your website has been running for a while or you have a lot of content already indexed in the search engines and you want to change the permalink structure, make sure that this is something that absolutely needs doing, as making changes to permalinks after your site has been running for a while could create SEO issues and errors.

Use 301 Redirection

As you’ve seen in earlier screenshots, some site owners (or their web developers) seem to be completely unaware of the search-friendly URLs feature of WordPress.

Maybe when you started, your site used the default WordPress permalinks and now you want to improve your site’s SEO. Maybe your website or blog 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 remove the date tags in the permalinks.

To edit your permalink structure without negatively affecting your site’s SEO or existing rankings you will need to add ‘301 redirections’ to point links that were set up using the previous permalinks syntax to links using the new permalink syntax.

A code ‘301’ is interpreted by search engines as a link that has permanently relocated. 301 redirection is the most efficient and search engine friendly way to redirect users to new web page destinations and avoid ‘404’ (Page not found) errors when following an old link.

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

You can site using a WP plugin 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 URL redirections using plugins or use the services of a professional)

Congratulations! Now you know how to change your site 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

***