Wouldn’t it be great if you could just publish a new post on your WordPress site, and the following would then happen … just from your web address:

• Potential visitors could easily glean what the post is about,
• Google could easily discover your pages and correctly index their content to improve your search rankings,
• Every item of content you create on your website would have its own unique identifier, making things easier to manage.

Well, this is what a WordPress permalink lets you do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

What Are Permalinks?

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 web address that others will use to link to your articles or sections of your site or the links you send in emails pointing to content items on your site. Some people also refer to permalinks as “pretty” URLs.

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

Why Do You Need To Use Permalinks?

Hopefully, you probably know by now that, WordPress is one of the best CMS applications you can use when it comes to SEO.

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

If you focus on the SEO aspect of your site or blog, then you should not ignore the importance of your site’s URLs. Google tends to give special significance to 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 aesthetics, usability, and forward-compatibility of your links.

Now … let’s take a look at the reason why you should configure your permalinks in WordPress.

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

WordPress uses the above link with a string query to locate information inside its database. It does not mean anything to search engines or visitors, and it doesn’t help your site with on-site SEO.

As you can see from the screenshot image below taken directly from Google search results, many site owners are still using default settings when publishing their content online …

Although Google is clearly still indexing the above sites, these site owners are potentially missing out on additional 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 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 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 …

By default, WordPress URLs are not very SEO-friendly. In this tutorial, you will learn how to configure your permalinks in WordPress to display your posts using SEO-friendly URLs.

How To Change Your WordPress Permalinks

Log into your WP dashboard section 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 default.

Common Settings – Permalinks

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

(Change 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/travel-tips/how-to-save-money-on-cruise-travel

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=4651

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

Permalink Tags

“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 is published, four digits (e.g. ‘2010’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘08’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘01’)
• %hour% – The hour the post gets published (e.g. ‘05’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘39’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘47’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘3625’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of the post title. For example, if the 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 letters converted to lower case and removed punctuation marks) in the URL. Tip: You can always edit the wording in your post titles 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 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 the ‘Custom Structure’ option and adding the /%postname%/ tag.

Optional Permalink Settings

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

This changes the ‘base’ tag or category 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 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 defaults will be used.

Remember to save your 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 – Additional Notes

Use Descriptive Categories

To get the best benefit from using Permalinks, you will need 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 consider if you are wondering whether or not to add categories to your permalink structure:

• If your domain is short and your category 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 or 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 adding category vs no category there really is no ”better” permalink structure to use. We recommend choosing the permalink structure you think will suit your needs best and that will make your post URLs short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We provide more information about WordPress categories in another article.

Make Your Posts Timeless

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

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

Visitors are less likely to click on a post if it is several years old, even if the content is relevant to the answers they are searching for.

What About Changing Permalinks In Blogs With Indexed 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 or blog has been running for a while or your site already has many posts indexed in the search engines and you would like to change the permalink structure, make sure that this is really necessary, as doing so could create issues and errors.

Add 301 Redirects

As you’ve seen earlier, many WordPress users (or their web developers) are completely unaware of the search-friendly URLs feature of WordPress.

Maybe when you started, your site used the default WordPress permalinks and now you would like to optimize your site better for search engines. Perhaps your site was configured to display post dates in your URLs and now all of your posts are perceived as being outdated and you want to delete the date tags of the URLs.

To edit your permalinks without impacting your site’s SEO or rankings in a negative way you should use ‘301 redirections’ to point links using the old permalink structure to web URLs using the new permalinks syntax.

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

To create an effective permalink structure change and avoid damaging your search rankings, sending visitors to error pages, etc. you will need to install and set up a redirection system before messing with the permalink structure of your site.

You can site or blog using WP plugins like Simple 301 Redirects, or Redirection, or use the services of a professional to assist you with setting up and redirecting your permalinks correctly to avoid any issues and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up a 301 redirection system for your changed permalinks using redirection plugins or get professional assistance)

Congratulations! Now you know how to configure your WordPress permalinks to display search engine-friendly URLs for your posts and improve your search results. For additional information on using Permalinks, see the official WordPress documentation below:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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