Wouldn’t it be great if you could simply publish a new post on your site, and the following took place … all from your post URL:

• Site visitors could easily gain an understanding of what your page was about,
• Search engines could discover your pages faster,
• Every item of content published on your website or blog would have a unique ID, making your site easier to manage.

Well, with permalinks you can easily do this!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalink – What Is It?

Permalinks are the permanent URLs to an individual WordPress post, category, or other taxonomy (a way to group things together) like archives.

A permalink is the web address that others use to link to your articles or sections of your site or the links you send in an email pointing readers to content items on your blog. Some people also call permalinks “pretty” URLs.

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

Why Do You Need To Use Permalinks?

Hopefully, you probably know that, WordPress is one of the best CMS tools 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 fine tuned using SEO plugins.

If you are looking to optimize the SEO aspect of your site, then you cannot ignore the importance of your URLs. Google tends to give special consideration to the URL structure of a site.

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

Now … let’s see why it’s best to set up permalinks in WordPress.

Typically, a default WordPress installation uses a URL structure for your posts that isn’t very search engine friendly and looks like this …

The link structure shown above is used by WordPress to find data within its database. It does not help your website with on-site SEO.

As you can see from the image below, many site owners haven’t configured their sites to use WordPress permalinks …

Although these sites are getting their content indexed on search engines, they are potentially missing out on extra SEO benefits.

To get maximum SEO benefit out of using WordPress 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 characters.

WordPress offers the ability to create a custom URL structure for your published and archived posts, so your content can easily go from something that is non-SEO friendly like 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 out-of-the-box linking structure and help every new post you add get better indexing results in Google.

Configuring WordPress Permalinks

From your WP dashboard menu, select Settings > Permalinks …

This will bring 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 “pretty” permalink instead for our posts. To do this, we need to specify a different Permalink structure than the one set by default.

Permalinks - Common 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 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/travel-europe/romantic-cruise-holiday-bargains

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=9084

(Using post name permalinks helps search engines and visitors understand what your page is about)

Using 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. ‘2014’)
• %monthnum% – The month your post gets published (e.g. ‘05’)
• %day% – The day the post gets published (e.g. ‘13’)
• %hour% – The hour your post is published (e.g. ‘21’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘51’)
• %second% – The exact second your post is published (e.g. ‘60’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘7136’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of the post title. For example, if your post title is ”Ten Signs That You’re About To Get Fired From Your Job!”, the postname tag will convert this into “ten-signs-that-youre-about-to-get-fired-from-your-job” (all characters converted to lower case and exclamation symbols deleted) in the URL. Tip: You can edit this text 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 the ‘Custom Structure’ option.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

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

This changes the ‘base’ tag or category of your URLs using the following syntax:

• domain.com/category_base/category_name
• domain.com/tag_base/tag_name

For example, changing your category base to “topics” would make your category links display as ‘http://domain.com/topics/uncategorized/’.

So, if you add the following to 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 WordPress uses the defaults.

Remember to save your changes when 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

Categories

To get more benefit from using Permalinks, remember 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 plugin developer Joost de Valk, here are a few things to keep in mind if you are wondering whether or not to add categories to your permalink structure:

• If your category slug 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 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 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 detailed information about WordPress categories in another tutorial.

Don’t Use Date Permalinks

Another great tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your site is a news site or there is a special reason why you need to date your site’s content, avoid using date-based permalinks when configuring your URLs.

(Avoid using URL structures that time-stamp your posts)

People are less likely to click on posts that are several years old, even if the content is relevant to what they are searching for.

Changing Permalinks In An Established Blog

Normally, your permalinks should be configured when you first install WordPress. 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 something that absolutely needs doing, as making changes to permalinks after your site has already been running for a while can create SEO issues and loss of traffic.

Use 301 Redirection

As you’ve seen in the above screenshots of actual search results, some WordPress users (or whoever set up their site) are completely 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 improve your site’s SEO. Maybe your site 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 remove the date tags in your permalinks.

The best way to modify your URL structure without negatively affecting your site’s SEO or existing rankings is to add ‘301 redirects’ to point links that were set up using the previous permalink structure to URLs using the new permalinks syntax.

Search engines interpret a ’301′ code as a link that has permanently moved to another location. 301 redirects are the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect visitors to new site destinations and avoid running into ‘404’ (Page not found) errors if they click on an old link.

To create an effective permalink structure change and avoid damaging your search rankings, sending visitors to broken links, etc. you should install and set up your redirection system before changing the permalink structure of your site.

You can WP site or blog 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 problems and troubleshoot any errors.

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

Congratulations! Now you know how to change your WordPress permalinks to display search engine-friendly URLs for your posts. For additional information on using Permalinks, refer to the WordPress codex below:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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