Wouldn’t it be great if after adding new content to your site, the following happened … all from your page URL:

• Readers could easily tell what the page was about,
• Search engines could easily find your posts and correctly index their content to improve your search rankings,
• Every post you create on your website or blog would have its own unique identifier, making things easier to manage.

Well, with WordPress permalinks you can!

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 others use to link to posts or sections of your site or the links you send in emails pointing readers to a particular item of content on your blog. Permalinks are often referred to as “pretty” URLs.

Permalinks make the URLs to each post on your blog permanent, hence a permalink.

Permalinks – Why Do We Need To Use Them?

Hopefully, you are probably aware by now that, WordPress is one of the best CMS tools you can use when it comes to SEO.

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

If you are looking to optimize the SEO aspect of your website, then you cannot ignore the importance of your site’s URLs. Search engines like Google place considerable weight on the URL structure of a site.

Permalinks can be used to turn 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 review the reason why it’s best to use permalinks if publishing content in WordPress.

Typically, a default WordPress installation uses a link-naming 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 doesn’t really mean anything to either visitors or search engines, and it doesn’t help your website with on-site SEO.

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

Although Google is still indexing the above sites, these site owners are potentially 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 set up your permalinks structure to make it more search engine-friendly by displaying relevant keywords in your URL, instead of meaningless characters.

WordPress gives 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 set up the Permalinks section of your WordPress site to display your posts using search engine-friendly URLs instead of the out-of-the-box URL structure and help every new post you add get better indexing results in Google.

Configuring WordPress Permalinks

In your WordPress admin 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 will need to specify a different Permalink structure than the one set by 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/seven-best-european-river-cruise-destinations

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=4858

(Using post name permalinks helps visitors understand what the post 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 the post is published, displayed as four digits (e.g. ‘2013’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘04’)
• %day% – The day your post is published (e.g. ‘25’)
• %hour% – The hour your post is published (e.g. ‘02’)
• %minute% – The minute your post is published (e.g. ‘10’)
• %second% – The exact second your post gets published (e.g. ‘11’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘604’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted version of your 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 exclamation symbol) 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 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’ option.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

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

This changes the ‘base’ tag or category URLs using the following structure:

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

For example, changing your category base to “recipes” would display your category links as ‘http://domain.com/recipes/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 these fields blank the defaults will be used.

Remember to save your 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 Information

Use Descriptive Categories

To get the best benefit out of 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 some points to consider if you are wondering whether you should add categories to your permalink structure or not:

• If your domain is short and your category 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 copy or share 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.

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. We recommend choosing the permalink structure you think will suit your site best and that will make your web address short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We cover WordPress categories in other tutorials.

Avoid Using Time-Specific URLs

Another useful tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your website is a news site or you have any special reason to create dated post URLs, avoid choosing date-based permalinks when setting up your blog’s URLs.

(Avoid using URL structures that date your content)

People 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 About Blogs With Published Content?

Normally, it’s best to set up your permalinks when you install a new WordPress site. This should be part of your website planning process.

If your website has been running for a while 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 changing permalinks after your site has already been up and running for a while can create issues and errors.

Use 301 Redirects

As you’ve seen in the above screenshots of actual search results, many WordPress site owners (or their web developers) are completely unaware of the search-friendly URLs feature of WordPress.

Maybe you started out using the default WordPress permalinks and now you want to improve your site’s SEO. Maybe your website or blog was originally set up to display post dates in your URLs and now all of your posts are showing as being 2-3 years old and you want to delete the date tags of the permalinks.

The best way to change your permalink structure without affecting your site’s SEO or rankings in a negative way is to use ‘301 redirects’ to reassign links that use the previous permalink structure to post URLs using the new permalinks syntax.

A ’301′ code is interpreted by search engines as a link that has permanently moved to another location. 301 redirection is the most efficient and search engine friendly way to redirect visitors to new web page destinations and avoid page errors if following an old link.

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

You can add a link redirection system to your do this using a WordPress redirection plugin like Simple 301 Redirects, or Redirection, or use the services of a professional to assist you with setting up and redirecting your permalinks correctly to avoid any problems and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up 301 redirections using plugins or get professional help)

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

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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