Wouldn’t it be great if after publishing content on your WordPress website, the following took place … all from your page URL:

• Site readers could understand what your post was about,
• Google could discover your pages faster,
• Every single content item added to your website or blog would have its own unique identifier, making things easier to manage.

Well, with WordPress permalinks this is really easy to do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – Definition

A permalink is the permanent URL to your individual posts, categories and other taxonomies (a way to organize things together) like archives.

A permalink is the URL that visitors and search engines will use to link to your posts or sections of your site or the links you send in emails pointing to your posts. Some people also refer to permalinks as “pretty” URLs.

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

Permalinks – Why Use Them?

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

WordPress is not only great for SEO out of the box, but its SEO aspect can be further improved with excellent SEO plugins.

If you are looking to optimize the SEO aspect of your site, 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 aesthetics, usability, and forward-compatibility of your links.

Now … let’s review the reason why you should 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 link structure with a string query shown above to locate information inside its database. It doesn’t really mean anything to either search engines or visitors, and it doesn’t help your site with on-site SEO.

As you can see from the image below, many WordPress site owners have not configured their sites to publish search optimized content …

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

To get the greatest SEO benefit out of 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 lets you create a custom URL structure for your published and archived posts, so your content can easily go from this …

To something like this …

In this step-by-step tutorial, you will learn how to configure the Permalinks section of your WordPress site to display your posts using SEO-friendly URLs instead of the out-of-the-box linking structure and help every new post you publish automatically get better indexing results in search engines.

Setting Up Your WordPress Permalinks

In your WordPress admin click on, 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 a search engine friendly URL instead for our posts. To do this, we will need to specify a different Permalink structure than the one set by default.

Common Settings – Permalinks

In the Common Settings section, select Custom Structure, then add one or more ‘tags’ (see below) to create search engine-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=204

(Using post name permalinks helps readers understand what your content is about)

Permalink Tags

“Pretty” URLs, or SEO-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. ‘2011’)
• %monthnum% – The month the post gets published (e.g. ‘07’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘08’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘06’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘34’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘53’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘1641’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted version of the post title. For example, if your post title is “Top Five Budget Travel Tips!”, the postname tag will convert this into “top-five-budget-travel-tips” (all lower case letters and no punctuation marks) in the URL. Tip: You can edit the wording in your post title 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 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 the ‘Custom Structure’ setting.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

If you need to configure custom structures for your tag and category archive pages you can do this in this section.

You can change 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, using “travel” as your category base will display your category links as ‘http://domain.com/travel/uncategorized/’.

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

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

To this …

If you leave these fields blank the defaults 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 – Additional Notes

Categories

To get the most SEO benefit out of 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 Joost de Valk, here are some points to consider if you are wondering whether you should add categories to your permalinks or not:

• If 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 copy and reduce 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.

Despite being the subject of intense debate in WordPress SEO circles, when it comes to category vs no category there really is no ”better” permalink structure to use. We recommend choosing the permalink structure you think will suit your site best and that will make your site’s web addresses short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We cover WordPress categories in another tutorial.

Avoid Setting Up Permalinks That Date Your Posts

Another useful tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your aim is to run a news blog or you have any special reason to create dated website addresses, avoid selecting date-based permalink options when setting up your URLs.

(Avoid using URL structures that date your content)

Although setting up permalinks that time-stamp your posts is better that using no permalinks at all from an SEO perspective, visitors are less likely to click on posts that are a couple of years old, even if the content is relevant to the answers they are searching for.

What About Changing Permalinks In An Established Site?

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

If your website or blog has been running for a while or your site already has a lot of posts indexed in the search engines and you want to change the permalink structure, make sure that this is something that absolutely needs doing, as doing so can create SEO issues and loss of traffic.

301 Redirection

As you’ve seen in earlier screenshots, many WordPress site owners (or whoever set up their site) seem to be unaware of the permalinks feature of WordPress.

Maybe you started out using the default WordPress URL structure and now you want to improve your SEO. Maybe your website was originally set up to display post dates in your URLs and now all of your posts are showing as being two or three years old and you want to remove the date portion of your permalinks.

To change your URL structure without negatively affecting your site’s SEO or rankings you will need to add ‘301 redirects’ to reassign links that use the old URL syntax to links that use the new structure.

A code ‘301’ is interpreted by search engines as a link that has permanently moved to another destination. 301 redirects are the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect users to new web page destinations and avoid ”page not found” errors if they click on an old link.

To effectively change your syntax and avoid damaging your rankings, sending visitors to error pages, etc. you will need to add your redirection system before changing the permalink structure of your site.

You can site or blog 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 issues and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up URL redirections using redirection plugins or use the services of a professional)

Congratulations! Now you know how to set up your WordPress site to display search engine-friendly URLs for your posts. For additional information on using Permalinks, see the WordPress codex here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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