Wouldn’t it be great if you could just publish a new page on your WordPress site, and the following happened … all from your web address:

• Potential visitors to your site could quickly assess what your post is about,
• Search engines could easily discover your post and correctly index its content to improve your search rankings,
• Each piece of content on your website would have its own unique ID, making things easier to manage.

Well, this is what permalinks let you do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalink – What Is It?

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 visitors and search engines will use to link to posts or sections of your site or the links you send in emails pointing to content items on your website. Permalinks are often called “pretty” URLs.

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

Why Use Permalinks?

Hopefully, you probably know by now that, WordPress is one of the best Content Management Systems available when it comes to publishing search engines optimized content.

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

If you are looking to optimize the SEO aspect of your site, then you should not ignore the importance of your site’s URLs. Search engines like Google tend to give special significance to the URL structure of a site.

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

Now … let’s review the reason why you should set up permalinks when publishing content in WordPress.

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

WordPress uses the link with a string query shown above to locate data within its database. It does not mean much to anyone, and it doesn’t help your site with on-site search engine optimization.

As you can see from the screenshot image below taken from Google search results, many WordPress users haven’t configured their sites to use WordPress permalinks …

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

To get the best possible 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 numbers and symbols.

WordPress lets you create a custom URL structure for your published posts, so your content can go from something that is non-SEO friendly like this …

To something like this …

By default, WordPress URLs are not very search engine-friendly. This step-by-step tutorial explains how to configure your permalinks in WordPress to display posts using search engine-friendly URLs.

How To Change Your WordPress Permalinks

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

Common Settings

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

(Configure 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/top-european-river-cruises

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=8055

(Using permalinks helps readers understand what your page is about)

Creating SEO-Friendly Tags

“Pretty” permalinks, 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. ‘2012’)
• %monthnum% – The month your post gets published (e.g. ‘03’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘16’)
• %hour% – The hour the post gets published (e.g. ‘23’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘53’)
• %second% – The exact second your post is published (e.g. ‘49’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘7243’)
• %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 punctuation symbols deleted) in the URL. Tip: You can always edit the words in your post titles 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 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 choosing the ‘Custom Structure’ setting and using the /%postname%/ tag.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

Here you can set up custom structures for your tag and category archive pages.

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 “recipes” as your category base will make your category links display 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 default settings will be used.

Remember to save your changes after you are 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 – Tips

Set Up Categories

To get maximum 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 plugin developer Joost de Valk, here are a few points to consider if you are wondering whether or not to add categories to your permalinks:

• If your category slug is short and descriptive (e.g. adds a relevant keyword or keyword phrase to your URL), you may want to use categories in 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 decrease 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.

Ultimately, when it comes to adding category vs no category there is no ”better” permalink structure to use. Choose a permalink structure you think will suit your site best. Your post URLs should be short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We provide more information about WordPress categories in other tutorials.

Don’t Use Date Permalinks

Another useful tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your site provides news, or there is a special reason why you need to create dated web URLs, it’s best to avoid selecting date-based permalink settings when setting up your site’s URLs.

(Avoid setting up permalinks that time-stamp your content)

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

What If My Site Already Has Published Posts?

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

If your website is already established or your site already has many posts indexed in the search engines and you would like to change the permalink structure, make sure that this is absolutely something that needs doing, as making changes to permalinks after your site has been going for a while could create SEO issues and loss of traffic.

Use 301 Redirects

As you’ve seen earlier, many website owners (or whoever set up their site) are unaware of the permalinks feature of WordPress.

Maybe you started out using the default WordPress permalinks and now you want to improve your SEO. Perhaps your site was configured to display post dates in your web address and now all of your posts are perceived as being outdated and you want to remove the date tags in your URLs.

To modify your permalink structure without impacting your site’s SEO or existing rankings in a negative way you should add ‘301 redirections’ to reassign all links that were set up using the previous permalink structure to URLs using the new structure.

A ’301′ code is interpreted by search engines as a link that has permanently moved. 301 redirection is the most efficient and search engine friendly way to redirect users to new website destinations and avoid running into ”page not found” errors if following an old link.

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

You can WP site using redirection plugins 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 any problems and troubleshoot any errors.

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

Congratulations! Now you know how to configure your blog’s permalinks to display SEO-friendly URLs for your posts. To learn more about using Permalinks, refer to the official WordPress documentation here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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