Wouldn’t it be great if you could just add content to your WordPress website, and the following would then take place … all from your post address:

• Potential site visitors could quickly assess what your content is about,
• Google would easily find your page and correctly classify your content for better search results,
• Every piece of content created on your website would have a unique ID, making your content easier to manage.

Well, with WordPress permalinks you can easily do this!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

What Is A Permalink?

Permalinks are the permanent URLs to an individual WordPress post, category, or other taxonomy (a way to organize things together) like archives.

A permalink is the web address that people and search engines use to link to your articles or sections of your site or the links you send in an email pointing to a particular item of content on your website. Permalinks are often called “pretty” URLs.

Permalinks make the URL pointing to each post on your site permanent, hence a perma-link.

Permalinks – Why Use Them?

As you have probably heard by now, WordPress is one of the best CMS tools available when it comes to publishing search optimized content.

WordPress is not only well optimized right out of the box, but the SEO aspect can be considerably enhanced using excellent SEO plugins.

If you are looking to optimize the SEO aspect of your site or blog, then you cannot ignore the importance of its site’s URLs. Google tends to pay special attention to the URL structure of your site.

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

Now … let’s turn our attention to the reason why it’s best to set up permalinks in WordPress.

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

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

As the screenshot below shows, many WordPress users are still using out of the box permalink settings when publishing their content online …

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

To get the greatest SEO benefit out of using WordPress and improve your site’s traffic results, you should set up your permalinks structure to make it more SEO-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 go from this …

To something like this …

Out of the box, WordPress URLs are not very SEO-friendly. In this step-by-step tutorial, you will learn how to configure your WordPress permalinks to help your content rank better in search engines like Google.

How To Change WordPress Permalinks

From your WordPress administration menu, 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 “pretty” permalink 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 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-tips/best-value-european-cruise-destinations

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=8024

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

Pretty URL Tags

“Pretty” permalinks, 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. ‘2012’)
• %monthnum% – The month your post gets published (e.g. ‘04’)
• %day% – The day your post gets published (e.g. ‘15’)
• %hour% – The hour your post is published (e.g. ‘20’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘55’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘13’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘9669’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of the post title. For example, if your 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 letters and exclamation marks deleted) in the URL. Tip: You can always edit the words 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’.

Optional Permalink Settings

If you need to configure custom structures for your tag and category URLs here is where you would do this.

This changes the ‘base’ tag or category for your 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 make your category links display 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 something like this …

If you leave the fields blank WordPress uses the defaults.

Remember to save your changes when 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

Use Short, Descriptive Categories

To get more benefit from using Permalinks, remember 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 and author of the WordPress SEO plugin 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 domain is short and your category name 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 or share 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 category vs no category there is no ideal permalink structure to use. Use a permalink structure that 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 articles.

Make Your Posts Timeless

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

(Avoid setting up permalinks that date your posts)

Although using URL structures that time-stamp your posts may be considered better that using no permalinks at all from an SEO point-of-view, people are less likely to click on a post that is several years old, even if the content is relevant to the answers they are searching for.

Changing Permalinks In Blog With Published Content

Normally, your site’s permalinks should be set up when you first install WordPress. This should be part of your website planning process.

If your website or blog 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 doing so can create issues and errors.

Use 301 Redirection

As you’ve seen in the above screenshots of actual search results, some WordPress site owners (or their web developers) are unaware of the permalinks 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. Perhaps your site was configured 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 in your permalinks.

To modify your permalinks without negatively affecting your site’s SEO or existing rankings you will need to add ‘301 redirections’ to point all links using the previous URL structure to links that use the new permalinks syntax.

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 running into ”page not found” errors when following an old link.

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

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

(Set up 301 redirects using redirection plugins or get professional assistance)

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

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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