Wouldn’t it be great if you could publish a new post on your WordPress website, and the following took place … all from your page address:

• Potential site visitors could easily gain an understanding of what the page was about,
• Search engines would easily discover your posts and correctly classify their content to improve your search rankings,
• Every single piece of content created on your website would have its own unique ID, making things easier to manage.

Well, this is what a WordPress permalink lets you do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – Definition

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

A permalink is the web address that other people use to link to articles or sections of your site or the links you send in an email pointing to articles on your site. Some people also call permalinks “pretty” URLs.

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

Why Use Permalinks?

Hopefully, you are probably aware that, WordPress is one of the best CMS applications available when it comes to SEO.

WordPress is not only great for SEO out of the box, but there are SEO plugins you can use that can easily help to fine tuned its SEO aspect.

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

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

Now … let’s review why it’s best to set up permalinks if publishing content in WordPress.

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

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

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

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

To get the most SEO benefit out of using and improve your site’s rankings, you should set up your permalinks structure to make it more search engine-friendly by displaying relevant keywords in your URL, instead of meaningless characters.

WordPress offers 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 step-by-step tutorial, you will learn how to configure your WordPress permalinks to display your posts using search engine-friendly URLs instead of the default URL structure and help every new post you add to your site get better indexing results in search engines like Google.

Setting Up Your WordPress Permalinks

Log into your WordPress admin and select Settings > Permalinks …

This will bring 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 search engine friendly URL instead for our posts. To do this, we will 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 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/europe-travel/river-cruise-holiday-bargains

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=8767

(Using permalinks helps search engines and readers understand what your post is about)

Permalink 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 gets published, displayed as four digits (e.g. ‘2011’)
• %monthnum% – The month your post gets published (e.g. ‘05’)
• %day% – The day your post is published (e.g. ‘24’)
• %hour% – The hour your post is published (e.g. ‘17’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘33’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘23’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘3939’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of your 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 characters converted to lower case and exclamation marks deleted) in the URL. Tip: You can always edit the wording 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 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 ‘Custom Structure’.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

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

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

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

For example, changing your category base to “topics” would display your category links as ‘http://domain.com/topics/category_name/’.

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

Your ‘category archives’ page URL will change from looking like this …

To this …

If you leave the optional settings fields blank the default settings 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 – Tips

Categories

To get maximum SEO 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 expert and author of the WordPress SEO plugin Joost de Valk, here are a few 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. uses a relevant keyword or keyword phrase), 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 share or copy and reduce 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.

Ultimately, when it comes to using category vs no category there really is no ideal permalink structure to use. Use a permalink structure that you think will suit your site best. Many SEO experts recommend making your web addresses short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We cover WordPress categories in another tutorial.

Avoid Time-Stamping Permalink Syntax

Another great tip from Joost de Valk is that unless you run a news website or blog or you have any special reason to date your content, avoid selecting date-based permalink settings when setting up your blog’s URLs.

(Avoid setting up permalinks that date your content)

Although using URL structures that time-stamp your content may be considered better that using no permalinks at all from an SEO point-of-view, visitors 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 About Blogs With Indexed Posts?

Normally, it’s best to configure your site’s permalinks when you perform a new WordPress installation. 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 would like to change the permalink structure, make sure that this is something that absolutely needs doing, as making changes to permalinks after your site has already been up and running for a while could create SEO issues and errors.

301 Redirects

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

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

To modify your permalinks without negatively affecting your site’s SEO you should use ‘301 redirections’ to point all links that were set up using the previous URL structure to page URLs using the new structure.

A ’301′ code is interpreted by search engines as a link that has permanently moved elsewhere. 301 redirection is the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect visitors to new site destinations and avoid page errors if clicking on an old link.

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

You can 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 issues and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up 301 redirections using redirection plugins or use the services of a professional)

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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