Wouldn’t it be great if you could publish content on your website or blog, and the following happened … all from your page URL:

• Potential site visitors could quickly glean what your page is about,
• Search engines would be able to easily find your page and correctly classify your content to improve your search results,
• Every single post created on your website or blog would have a unique identifier, making your content 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 an individual post, category, or other taxonomy (a way to group things together) like archives.

A permalink is the URL that others will use to link to articles or sections of your site or the links you send in an email pointing to a specific post on your website. Permalinks are often called “pretty” URLs.

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

Permalinks – Why Do We Need To Use Them?

As you are probably aware, WordPress is one of the best Content Management Systems you can use when it comes to SEO.

WordPress is not only well optimized right out of the box, but there are SEO plugins you can use that can help to improve its SEO aspect further.

If you are looking to optimize the SEO aspect of your website, then you should not ignore the importance of your site’s URLs. Google tends to pay special attention to the structure of a site’s URLs when indexing its pages.

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

Now … let’s see why it’s best to configure your permalinks when publishing content in WordPress.

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

The link structure shown above is used by WordPress to locate data within your database. It doesn’t really mean anything to search engines or visitors, and it doesn’t help your site with on-site SEO.

As you can see from the screenshot image below, many site owners are still using out of the box settings when publishing content …

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

To get optimal SEO benefit out of 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 offers you 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 something with an SEO-friendly URL like this …

Out of the box, WordPress post URLs are not very SEO-friendly. In this step-by-step tutorial, you will learn how to configure your permalinks in WordPress to automatically help you get better indexing results in Google.

Setting Up Your WordPress Permalinks

In your WordPress dashboard click on, Settings > Permalinks …

This brings 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 “pretty” permalinks instead for our posts. To do this, we need to specify a different Permalink structure than the default.

Common Settings – Permalinks

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

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=3861

(Using permalinks helps search engines and visitors understand what the content is about)

Search Engine-Friendly Tags

“Pretty” permalinks, or search engine-friendly URLs, are created by adding one or more ‘tags’ in the Custom Structure field:

• %year% – The year of the post, four digits (e.g. ‘2010’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘03’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘21’)
• %hour% – The hour your post is published (e.g. ‘15’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘25’)
• %second% – The exact second the post gets published (e.g. ‘56’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘4024’)
• %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 exclamation marks deleted) in the URL. Tip: You can always edit this text 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 adding the /%postname%/ tag in the ‘Custom Structure’ option.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

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

You can change the ‘base’ category or tag 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 make your category links display as ‘http://domain.com/travel/uncategorized/’.

So, if you add the following to your permalinks Optional > Category base settings section …

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

To this …

If you leave these fields blank WordPress uses the defaults.

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 from 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 and author of the WordPress SEO plugin Joost de Valk, here are some things 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 slug is short and descriptive (e.g. uses a relevant keyword or keyword phrase), 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 copy 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.

Ultimately, when it comes to adding category vs no category there really 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 site’s web addresses short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We provide detailed information about WordPress categories in another article.

Avoid Using Date-Based URLs

Another useful tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your website provides news, or you have a special reason to date your content, it’s best to avoid selecting date-based permalink options for your site’s URLs.

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

Although setting up permalinks that date your posts may be considered better that using no permalinks at all from an SEO aspect, people are less likely to click on a post if it is a couple of years old, even if the content is relevant to what they are searching for.

What If My Blog Has Content?

Normally, your site’s permalinks should be configured when you perform a new WordPress installation. This should be part of your website 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 doing so could create issues and errors.

Use 301 Redirection

As you’ve seen earlier, some site owners (or their web developers) seem to be completely unaware of the SEO-friendly URLs feature of WordPress.

Maybe when you started, your site used the default WordPress permalinks and now you would like to optimize your site better for search engines. Maybe your website was originally set up to display post dates in your web address and now all of your posts are showing as being 2-3 years old and you want to delete the date portion of your URLs.

To modify your permalinks without negatively affecting your site’s SEO or existing rankings you will need to add ‘301 redirects’ to point all links that use the old permalink syntax to destinations that use the new syntax.

Search engines interpret a ’301′ code as a link that has permanently relocated to another destination. 301 redirection is the most efficient and search engine friendly way to redirect users to new web page destinations and avoid running into ”page not found” errors if they click on an old link.

To create an effective syntax change and avoid SEO problems, sending visitors to broken links, etc. you will need to add a redirection system before changing the permalink structure of your site.

You can site 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 issues and troubleshoot any errors.

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

Congratulations! Now you know how to configure your blog to display SEO-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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