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

• Site visitors could easily tell what the post is about,
• Google would be able to find your pages faster,
• Each content item added to your website or blog would have its own 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?

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 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 to content items on your blog. Permalinks are often referred to as “pretty” URLs.

Permalinks make the URL pointing to each post on your website permanent, hence a permalink.

Permalinks – Why Do We Need To Use Them?

As you have probably heard by now, WordPress is one of the best CMS tools you can use when it comes to SEO.

WordPress is not only great for SEO out of the box, but its SEO aspect can be further finetuned with SEO plugins.

If you are looking to optimize the SEO aspect of your website, then you should not ignore the importance of your URLs. Search engines like Google place considerable weight on the structure of URLs when indexing content.

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

Now … let’s review the reason why you may need to configure your permalinks in WordPress.

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

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

As the screenshot image from Google search listings below shows, many site owners are still using default permalink settings when publishing content online …

Although Google is clearly still indexing the above sites, many site owners are missing out on extra SEO benefits.

To get the best possible SEO benefit from using and improve your site’s traffic results, you will want to make sure to set up your permalinks structure to make it more search engine-friendly by displaying relevant keywords in your URL, instead of meaningless numbers and symbols.

WordPress allows you to create a custom URL structure for your published and archived posts, so your pages can go from this …

To something with an SEO-friendly URL like this …

By default, WordPress URLs are not very SEO-friendly. In this step-by-step tutorial, you will learn how to set up your permalinks in WordPress to display posts using SEO-friendly URLs.

How To Set Up WordPress Permalinks

In your WordPress admin section click on, 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 “pretty” permalink instead for our posts. To do this, we will need to specify a different Permalink structure than the default one.

Permalinks - 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 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/river-cruises/river-cruise-holiday-deals

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=251

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

Pretty Permalink Tags

“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. ‘2011’)
• %monthnum% – The month your post gets published (e.g. ‘07’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘21’)
• %hour% – The hour your post is published (e.g. ‘04’)
• %minute% – The minute your post gets published (e.g. ‘59’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘52’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘9032’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted 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 lower case letters and exclamation symbols deleted) 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 the ‘Custom Structure’ setting and adding the /%postname%/ tag.

Optional Permalink Settings

This section lets you configure custom structures for your category and tag archive pages.

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

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

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

So, if you make the following change 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 defaults.

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

Set Up Categories

To get maximum SEO benefit from using Permalinks, you will need 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 plugin developer Joost de Valk, here are some things to consider if you are wondering whether or not to add categories to your permalinks:

• If your category 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 share or copy and decrease the SEO benefit.
• Do you plan to post content under only one category or multiple categories? If you are going 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 ”better” 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 other articles.

Avoid Setting Up URL Structures That Date Your Content

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

(Avoid setting up URL structures that date your posts)

People 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 About Established Sites?

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

If your website or blog is already established or your site already has a lot of posts 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 doing so can create SEO issues and loss of traffic.

Add 301 Redirection

As you’ve seen in earlier screenshots, many website owners (or whoever set up their site) are completely unaware of the SEO-friendly URLs feature of WordPress.

Maybe you started out using the default WordPress URL structure and now you would like to optimize your site better for search engines. Perhaps your website was configured to display post dates in your URLs and now all of your posts are perceived as being outdated and you want to delete the date portion of the permalinks.

The best way to modify your URL structure without impacting your site’s SEO or existing rankings in a negative way is to add ‘301 redirects’ to reassign all links that were set up using the previous permalink syntax to post URLs that use the new permalinks syntax.

Search engines interpret a code ‘301’ as a link that has permanently moved elsewhere. 301 redirection is the most efficient and search engine friendly way to redirect users to new web page destinations and avoid running into page errors if 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 site or blog using a WP 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 a redirection system using redirection plugins or use the services of a professional)

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

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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