Wouldn’t it be great if you could simply publish content on your site, and the following happened … just from your post URL:

• New visitors could easily glean what your page is about,
• Search engines could easily discover your post and correctly index the content to improve your search results,
• Each item of content you create on your website would have its own unique identifier, making your content easier to manage.

Well, this is what permalinks let you do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – Definition

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

A permalink is the URL that others will use to link to your articles or sections of your site or the links you send in emails pointing readers to articles 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 perma-link.

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 SEO.

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

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 tend to give special consideration to the URL structure of a site.

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

Now … let’s take a look at the reason why it’s best to configure your permalinks in WordPress.

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

WordPress uses the above link structure with a string query to find data within its database. It does not mean much to anyone, and it doesn’t help your site with on-site search engine optimization.

As the screenshot below shows, many WordPress site owners are still using default permalink settings when publishing content …

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

To get the best possible SEO benefit from using and improve your site’s traffic results, 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 numbers and symbols.

WordPress offers you the ability 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 …

Out of the box, WordPress post URLs are not very search engine-friendly. This tutorial shows you how to configure your permalinks in WordPress to display your posts with search engine-friendly URLs.

How To Change WordPress Permalinks

In your WP main menu, 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 search engine friendly URLs instead for our posts. To do this, we 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 …

(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/travel-tips/5-top-european-river-cruises

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=8475

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

Creating Pretty WordPress URLs

“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, four digits (e.g. ‘2010’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘03’)
• %day% – The day the post is published (e.g. ‘06’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘14’)
• %minute% – The minute the post gets published (e.g. ‘01’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘30’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘4071’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of your post title. For example, if your post title is ”It Ain’t Worth Doin’ No More!”, the postname tag will convert this into “it-aint-worth-doin-no-more” (all letters converted to lower case and exclamation marks deleted) in the URL. Tip: You can always edit the words in your post title 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’.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

This section lets you configure custom structures for your category and tag 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 “topics” as your category base will display your category links as ‘http://domain.com/topics/uncategorized/’.

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

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

To something like this …

If you leave the fields blank WordPress uses the defaults.

Remember to save any changes after you have 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

Set Up Your Categories

To get the most benefit out of 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 expert 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 category 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 copy and reduce 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 we recommend not using the category tag in your permalink structure.

Despite being the subject of intense debate in WordPress SEO circles, when it comes to category vs no category there really is no perfect permalink structure to use. Choose a permalink structure you think will suit your needs best. Your web addresses should be short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We cover WordPress categories in other tutorials.

Avoid Setting Up URL Syntaxes That Time-Stamp Your Content

Another tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your website provides news or time-specific information, or you have a special reason to date your site’s content, avoid using date-based permalink syntax when configuring your site’s URLs.

(Avoid using permalinks that date your posts)

Although setting up URL structures that date your posts is better that using no permalinks at all from an SEO point-of-view, visitors are less likely to click on posts that are a couple of years old, even if the content is relevant to what they are searching for.

Changing Permalinks In An Established Site

Normally, your site’s permalinks should be configured when you create a new WordPress site. This should be part of your site planning process.

If your website is already established 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 really something that needs doing, as changing permalinks after your site has been up and running for a while could create issues and loss of traffic.

301 Redirection

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

Maybe when you started, your site used the default WordPress URL structure and now you want to optimize your site better for search engines. Perhaps your site was configured to display post dates in your web address and now all of your content is showing as being 2-3 years old and you want to remove the date portion of the URLs.

To modify your URL structure without negatively impacting your site’s SEO or rankings you will need to use ‘301 redirections’ to reassign all links set up using the old URL syntax to links using the new permalink syntax.

A code ‘301’ is interpreted by search engines as a link that has permanently moved elsewhere. 301 redirects are the most efficient and search engine friendly way to redirect users to new web page destinations and avoid running into ‘404’ (Page not found) errors if clicking on an old link.

To effectively change your permalink syntax and avoid SEO problems, sending visitors to error pages, etc. you will need to install and set up your redirection system before messing with the permalink structure of your site.

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

(Set up 301 redirects using a WordPress redirection plugin or get professional assistance)

Congratulations! Now you know how to change your site’s permalinks to display search engine-friendly URLs for your posts. To learn more about using Permalinks, refer to the official WordPress documentation below:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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