Wouldn’t it be great if you could just add new content to your WordPress site, and the following would then happen … all from your page address:

• Readers could tell what the post was about,
• Search engines would be able to find your posts faster,
• Every content item created on your site would have its own unique ID, making your content easier to manage.

Well, with permalinks you can!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

What Are Permalinks?

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 people and search engines will use to link to your posts or sections of your site or the links you send in an email pointing to posts on your site. Some people also call permalinks “pretty” URLs.

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

Permalinks – Why Use Them?

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 the SEO aspect can be easily finetuned using SEO plugins.

If you are looking to optimize the SEO aspect of your site or blog, then you should not ignore the importance of your site’s URLs. Search engines like Google tend to pay special attention to 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 see why you should set up permalinks in WordPress.

Normally, a default WordPress installation uses a non-search engine friendly link-naming structure for your posts that looks like this …

The above link structure is used by WordPress to locate information within your database. It does not help your site with on-site search engine optimization.

As the screenshot image taken from Google search listings below shows, many WordPress users haven’t yet set up their permalinks to publish search optimized content online …

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

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

WordPress lets you create a custom URL structure for your published posts, so your content can easily go from this …

To this …

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

Configuring WordPress Permalinks

From your WordPress administration menu, 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 a “pretty” permalink instead for our posts. To do this, we will need to specify a different Permalink structure than the default one.

Common Permalink Settings

In the Common Settings section, select Custom Structure, then add one or more ‘tags’ (see below) to create SEO-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/europe-travel/five-best-european-river-cruise-destinations

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=3891

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

How To Create Pretty WordPress URLs

“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, displayed as four digits (e.g. ‘2011’)
• %monthnum% – The month your post is published (e.g. ‘11’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘22’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘02’)
• %minute% – The minute your post gets published (e.g. ‘05’)
• %second% – The exact second the post is published (e.g. ‘03’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘598’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted version of the 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 letters and no exclamation 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 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 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 selecting ‘Custom Structure’ and using the /%postname%/ tag.

Optional Permalink Settings

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

You can change the ‘base’ category or tag URLs using the following syntax:

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

For example, using “news” as your category base 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 this …

To this …

If you leave the fields blank WordPress uses the default settings.

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 Info

Use Short, 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, WordPress will use the default category (uncategorized).

According to WordPress SEO plugin developer Joost de Valk, here are some things 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 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 or copy and decrease the SEO benefit.
• 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 ideal permalink structure to use. We recommend choosing the permalink structure you think will suit your site 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 article.

Avoid Time-Specific Permalink Syntax

Another tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your website is a news blog or you have a special reason to add dates to your post URLs, it’s best to avoid selecting date-based permalink syntax when setting up your site’s URLs.

(Avoid setting up permalinks that date your content)

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

What About Changing Permalinks In An Established Site?

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

If your site 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 absolutely something that needs to be done, as changing permalinks after your site has been running for a while can create 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 unaware of the SEO-friendly URLs feature of WordPress.

Maybe you started out using the default WordPress permalinks and now you want to improve your site’s SEO. Perhaps your site was configured to display post dates in your web address and now all of your posts are showing as being two or three years old and you want to delete the date portion of the URLs.

The best way to change your permalink structure without impacting your site’s SEO or rankings in a negative way is to add ‘301 redirects’ to point links that were set up using the previous permalinks syntax to web addresses that use the new permalinks syntax.

A ’301′ code is interpreted by search engines as a link that has been permanently relocated to another address. 301 redirects are the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect users to new website destinations and avoid ”page not found” errors when clicking on an old link.

To effectively change your syntax and avoid SEO problems, sending visitors to broken links, etc. you will need to configure a redirection system before messing with 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 assist you with setting up and redirecting your permalinks correctly to avoid any issues and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up link redirections using redirection plugins or get professional help)

Congratulations! Now you know about the built-in system WordPress uses to display SEO-friendly URLs for your posts. For additional information on using Permalinks, refer to the official WordPress documentation below:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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