Wouldn’t it be great if after publishing a new page on your website or blog, the following could happen … all from your post address:

• New visitors could glean what the page was about,
• Search engines would be able to discover your posts faster,
• Every content item published on 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 WordPress posts, categories and other taxonomies (a way to group things together) like archives.

A permalink is the web address that other people will use to link to articles or sections of your site or the links you send in emails pointing to a specific post on your blog. Some people also refer to permalinks as “pretty” URLs.

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

Why Do You Need To Use Permalinks?

As you are probably aware, WordPress is one of the best CMS tools available when it comes to SEO.

WordPress is not only great for SEO out of the box, but there are excellent SEO plugins you can install that can further help to fine tuned 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 its URLs. Google tends to give special consideration to the structure of URLs when indexing its content.

Permalinks are 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 if 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 within your database. It doesn’t really help your site with on-site search engine optimization.

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

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

To get maximum SEO benefit from using and improve your site’s rankings, you should configure your permalinks structure to make it more SEO-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 this …

To something with an SEO-friendly URL like this …

In this tutorial, you will learn how to configure your WordPress permalinks to display your posts with SEO-friendly URLs instead of the default linking structure and help every new post you add get better indexing in search engines like Google.

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

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/cruise-travel/3-best-european-river-cruises

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=2976

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

Search Engine-Friendly Tags

“Pretty” permalinks, or SEO-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. ‘2015’)
• %monthnum% – The month your post is published (e.g. ‘10’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘27’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘17’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘45’)
• %second% – The exact second the post is published (e.g. ‘06’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘4094’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted version of your post title. For example, if the post title is ”It Ain’t Worth Doin’ No More!”, the postname tag will convert this into “it-aint-worth-doin-no-more” (all lower case characters and removed punctuation symbols) in the URL. Tip: You can 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 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 URLs you can do this in this section.

This changes the ‘base’ tag or category of 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 “news” would display your category links as ‘http://domain.com/news/category_name/’.

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

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

To something like this …

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

Remember to save your 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

Categories

To get the best possible benefit from using Permalinks, it’s important 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 and author of the WordPress SEO plugin Joost de Valk, here are a few 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 slug 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.
• If you are going 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 using category vs no category there is no ”better” permalink structure to use. Use a permalink structure that you think will suit your needs 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.

Don’t Use Date Permalinks

Another great tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your website provides news or time-specific information, or there is a special reason why you need to date your content, avoid using date-based permalink syntax for your URLs.

(Avoid setting up URL structures that date your content)

Although setting up permalinks that time-stamp your content is better that using no permalinks at all from an SEO perspective, visitors 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.

What If My Blog Has Indexed Content?

Normally, it’s best to configure your site’s permalinks when you first install WordPress. 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 something that needs to be done, as changing permalinks after your site has been running for a while can create SEO issues and errors.

Add 301 Redirection

As you’ve seen in the above screenshots of actual search results, some WordPress users (or their web developers) are completely unaware of the SEO-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. Maybe your site was originally set up to display post dates in your web address and now all of your content is perceived as being outdated and you want to delete the date portion of the permalinks.

The best way to change your permalink structure without negatively impacting your site’s SEO is to use ‘301 redirections’ to point links that use the previous permalinks structure to post URLs using the new permalinks syntax.

Search engines interpret a ’301′ code as a link that has permanently moved to another destination. 301 redirection is the most efficient and search engine friendly way to redirect users to new website destinations and avoid running into page errors if they click on an old link.

To create an effective permalink structure change and avoid SEO problems, sending visitors to broken links, etc. you will need to add your redirection system before changing the permalink structure of your site.

You can site using a WordPress redirection plugin like Simple 301 Redirects, or Redirection, or get a professional to assist you with setting up and redirecting your permalinks correctly to avoid problems and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up 301 redirects using redirection plugins or use the services of a professional)

Congratulations! Now you know about the built-in system WordPress uses to display SEO-friendly URLs for your posts and improve your search search rankings. To learn more about using Permalinks, refer to the official WordPress documentation here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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