Wouldn’t it be great if you could add content to your WordPress website or blog, and the following happened … just from your post URL:

• Readers could glean what your content was about,
• Search engines would discover your pages faster,
• Each piece of content added to your website or blog would have a 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 your individual posts, categories and other taxonomies (a way to group things together) like archives.

A permalink is the web address that people and search engines use to link to your posts or sections of your site or the links you send in emails pointing to a particular item of content on your website. Some people also call permalinks “pretty” URLs.

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

Permalinks – Why Do You Need To Use Them?

Hopefully, you are probably aware by now that, 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 considerably finetuned using 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 URL structure of your site.

Permalinks are 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 take a look at why you should set up permalinks in WordPress.

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

WordPress uses the above link structure to find data within your database. It does not mean anything to visitors or search engines, and it doesn’t help your website with on-site search engine optimization.

As you can see from the screenshot below, many WordPress site owners have not configured their sites to use permalinks …

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

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

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

To something like this …

By default, WordPress URLs are not very SEO-friendly. This tutorial shows you how to set up your permalinks in WordPress to automatically get better indexing in search engines.

Changing WordPress Permalinks

In your WordPress dashboard section click on, Settings > Permalinks …

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

Common Permalink Settings

In the Common Settings section, select Custom Structure, then add one or more ‘tags’ (see below) to create search engine-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/how-to-save-money-on-cruise-travel

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=4950

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

How To Add SEO-Friendly Tags In Custom Structure

“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, displayed as four digits (e.g. ‘2014’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘12’)
• %day% – The day the post gets published (e.g. ‘24’)
• %hour% – The hour the post gets published (e.g. ‘16’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘45’)
• %second% – The exact second the post gets published (e.g. ‘18’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘2095’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of the 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 characters converted to lower case and no exclamation mark) in the URL. Tip: You can edit the wording in your post titles 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 choosing the ‘Custom Structure’ option and using the /%postname%/ tag.

Optional Permalink Settings

If you need to configure custom structures for your tag and category archive pages you can do this in this section.

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

So, if you enter the following in 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 optional settings fields blank WordPress uses the default settings.

Remember to save any 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

Set Up Your Categories

To get maximum benefit from 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 keep in mind if you are wondering whether or not to add categories to your permalink structure:

• If your category name is short and descriptive (e.g. uses a relevant keyword or keyword phrase), you may want to use the category tag 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 decrease 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 using category vs no category there is no perfect permalink structure to use. Choose the permalink structure you think will suit your needs 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 other articles.

Create Timeless Posts

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

(Avoid setting up URL structures that time-stamp your content)

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.

Changing Permalinks In Site With Indexed Posts

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

If your site 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 absolutely something that needs to be done, as making changes to permalinks after your site has already been running for a while can create issues and loss of traffic.

Use 301 Redirects

As you’ve seen in earlier screenshots, many WordPress users (or their web developers) seem to be 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. Maybe your website or blog was configured to display post dates in your URLs and now all of your posts are showing as being old and you want to remove the date portion of your URLs.

The best way to edit your permalink structure without affecting your site’s SEO or existing rankings in a negative way is to add ‘301 redirects’ to reassign links set up using the previous permalinks syntax to web URLs using the new permalink structure.

Search engines interpret a ’301′ code as a link that has permanently been moved to another destination. 301 redirects are the most efficient and search engine friendly way to redirect users to new web page destinations and avoid ‘404’ (Page not found) errors if following an old link.

To create an effective permalink structure change and avoid SEO problems, sending visitors to broken links, etc. you should set up your redirection system before messing with the permalink structure of your site.

You can WP site or blog using plugins 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 any issues and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up a link redirection system for your changed URLs using a WordPress redirection plugin 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 WordPress codex below:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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