Wouldn’t it be great if after publishing content on your website, the following could take place … all from your post URL:

• Readers could easily glean what the post was about,
• Google would be able to easily discover your posts and correctly classify their content to improve your search results,
• Every single post published on your website would have its own unique ID, making things easier to manage.

Well, this is what a permalink lets you do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

What Are Permalinks?

A permalink is the permanent URL 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 to a particular item of content on your site. Permalinks are often called “pretty” URLs.

Permalinks make the URL pointing to each post on your site permanent, hence a permalink.

Why Use Permalinks?

Hopefully, you are probably aware that, WordPress is one of the best Content Management Systems you can use when it comes to SEO.

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

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

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

Now … let’s turn our attention to the reason why you may need to set up permalinks in WordPress.

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

WordPress uses the above link structure with a string query to find data inside your database. It doesn’t really mean anything to either visitors or search engines, and it doesn’t help your site with on-site SEO.

As the screenshot from Google search results below shows, many site owners haven’t yet configured their sites to use permalinks …

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

To get the maximum SEO benefit out of using WordPress and improve your site’s rankings, you should set up your permalinks structure to make it more SEO-friendly by displaying relevant keywords in your URL, instead of meaningless characters.

WordPress allows you to create a custom URL structure for your published and archived posts, so your pages can go from this …

To this …

In this step-by-step tutorial, you will learn how to set up your WordPress permalinks to display your posts with SEO-friendly URLs instead of the default linking structure and help every new post you add to your site get better indexing results in Google.

Configuring Your WordPress Permalinks

Log into your WordPress admin and select Settings > Permalinks …

This brings up 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 search engine friendly URL instead for our posts. To do this, we will 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 SEO-friendly URLs …

(Configure your permalink settings to create SEO-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-cruises/how-to-save-money-on-cruise-travel

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=1550

(Using post name permalinks helps visitors understand what the post is about)

How To Use Permalink Tags

“Pretty” permalinks, 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. ‘2015’)
• %monthnum% – The month your post gets published (e.g. ‘03’)
• %day% – The day your post gets published (e.g. ‘24’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘22’)
• %minute% – The minute the post gets published (e.g. ‘07’)
• %second% – The exact second the post gets published (e.g. ‘58’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘1005’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of the post title. For example, if your post title is ”Ten Best Hotels In Cote D’Azur!”, the postname tag will convert this into “ten-best-hotels-in-cote-dazur” (all characters converted to lower case and exclamation symbols deleted) 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 adding the /%postname%/ tag in ‘Custom Structure’.

Optional Permalink Settings

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

This changes the ‘base’ category or tag 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” would make your category links display as ‘http://domain.com/travel/uncategorized/’.

So, if you add the following to your permalinks Optional > Category base settings section …

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

To this …

If you leave the fields blank the defaults 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 – Additional Information

Use Descriptive Categories

To get the best SEO benefit out of using Permalinks, you will need 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 points to keep in mind if you are wondering whether or not to add categories to your permalinks:

• If your category name is short and descriptive (e.g. adds a relevant keyword or keyword phrase to your URL), 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 copy and decrease the SEO benefit.
• Do you plan to post content under only one category or multiple categories? If you are going 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 using category vs no category there really is no perfect 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 tutorial.

Make Your Posts Timeless

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

(Avoid setting up permalinks that date your posts)

People 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.

What If My Site Already Has Lots Of Indexed Posts?

Normally, your permalinks should be configured when you first install WordPress. This should be part of your site planning process.

If your website or blog 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 absolutely necessary, as changing permalinks after your site has been going for a while could create issues and errors.

301 Redirection

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

Maybe when you started out, your site used the default WordPress permalinks and now you want to improve your 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 delete the date portion of the URLs.

The best way to modify your URL structure without impacting your site’s SEO or existing rankings in a negative way is to add ‘301 redirections’ to point all links that were set up using the previous URL structure to destinations using the new syntax.

A ’301′ code is interpreted by search engines as a link that has permanently relocated. 301 redirects are the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect users to new site destinations and avoid running into page errors when clicking on an old link.

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

You can add a link redirection system to your site or blog using a WP 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 issues and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up URL redirections using a WordPress plugin or get professional assistance)

Congratulations! Now you know how to change your blog to display search engine-friendly URLs for your posts. To learn more about using Permalinks, see the WordPress codex here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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