Wouldn’t it be great if you could simply add new content to your website or blog, and the following happened … just from your page address:

• Visitors could understand what your content is about,
• Google would be able to find your pages faster,
• Every single piece of content added to your website would have its own unique identifier, making your content easier to manage.

Well, with permalinks this can easily be done!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

What Are Permalinks?

A permalink is the permanent URL to an individual post, category, or other taxonomy (a way to group things together) like archives.

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

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

Permalinks – Why Do We Need To 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 well optimized right out of the box, but the SEO aspect can be considerably fine tuned with SEO plugins.

If you are looking to optimize the SEO aspect of your website, then you should not ignore the importance of its URLs. Google tends to pay special attention to the URL structure of a 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 usability, aesthetics, and forward-compatibility of your links.

Now … let’s review the reason why it’s best to use permalinks when publishing content 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 …

WordPress uses the above link with a string query to find information inside your database. It doesn’t really help your site with on-site SEO.

As you can see from the image below taken directly from Google search listings, many site owners haven’t yet set up their permalinks …

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

To get the greatest SEO benefit from using WordPress and improve your site’s traffic results, you will want to make sure to configure 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 and archived posts, so your pages can easily go from this …

To something like this …

In this 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 publish automatically get better indexing results in search engines.

Configuring WordPress Permalinks

From your WP 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 “pretty” permalinks instead for our posts. To do this, we need to specify a different Permalink structure than the one set by 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/how-to-save-money-on-cruise-travel

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=2069

(Using post name permalinks helps search engines and readers understand what the page is about)

Creating Pretty URL Tags In Custom Structure

“Pretty” URLs, or SEO-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. ‘2013’)
• %monthnum% – The month your post is published (e.g. ‘10’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘27’)
• %hour% – The hour the post is published (e.g. ‘07’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘09’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘24’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘347’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted version of your post title. For example, if the post title is ”The Five Don’ts Of DIY Home Repair!”, the postname tag will convert this into “the-five-donts-of-diy-home-repair” (all lower case characters and exclamation marks removed) in the URL. Tip: You can always edit the URL 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 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 structures for your category and tag page URLs you can do this in this section.

This changes 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 “topics” as your category base will display your category links as ‘http://domain.com/topics/uncategorized/’.

So, if you make the following change in your permalinks Optional > Category base settings section …

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

To this …

If you leave the 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

Categories

To get the optimal SEO benefit out of using Permalinks, it’s important 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 expert Joost de Valk, here are a few things to consider 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 categories 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 and reduce the SEO benefit.
• 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 ideal 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 cover WordPress categories in other tutorials.

Avoid Using URL Structures That Time-Stamp Your Posts

Another great tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your website provides news, or there is a special reason why you need to add dates to your URLs, avoid using date-based permalink syntax when setting up your blog’s URLs.

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

People are less likely to click on a post if it is a couple of years old, even if the content is relevant to the answers they are searching for.

What If My Site Has Lots Of Published Posts?

Normally, it’s best to set up your permalinks when you perform a new WordPress installation. 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 want to change the permalink structure, make sure that this is absolutely necessary, as changing permalinks after your site has already been running for a while can create SEO issues and errors.

Add 301 Redirection

As you’ve seen earlier, many WordPress users (or whoever set up their site) seem to be completely 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 SEO. Perhaps your website was originally set up to display post dates in your web address and now all of your content is showing as being 2-3 years old and you want to delete the date portion of your URLs.

To modify your URL structure without negatively impacting your site’s SEO or rankings you should use ‘301 redirects’ to reassign all links that were set up using the old URL syntax to URLs that use the new permalink structure.

A code ‘301’ is interpreted by search engines as a link that has permanently relocated. 301 redirection is the most efficient and search engine friendly way to redirect visitors to new site destinations and avoid running into ‘404’ (Page not found) errors when they click on an old link.

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

You can WP site using redirection plugins like Simple 301 Redirects, or Redirection, or get a professional to assist you with setting up and redirecting your permalinks correctly to avoid problems and troubleshoot any errors.

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

Congratulations! Now you know about the built-in system WordPress uses to display SEO-friendly URLs for your posts and improve your search search rankings. To learn more about using Permalinks, see the official WordPress documentation here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

***