Wouldn’t it be great if after publishing new content on your website, the following took place … all from your URL:

• Potential visitors could easily understand what the post is about,
• Search engines could discover your posts faster,
• Each content item 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

Permalink – What Is It?

Permalinks are the permanent URLs to your individual WordPress posts, categories and other taxonomies (a way to group things together) like archives.

A permalink is the URL that others will use to link to articles or sections of your site or the links you send in an email pointing readers to articles on your site. Permalinks are often called “pretty” URLs.

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

Why Use Permalinks?

Hopefully, you probably know that, WordPress is one of the best CMS applications you can use when it comes to publishing search optimized content.

WordPress is not only well optimized straight out of the box, but its SEO aspect can be further improved using excellent SEO plugins.

If you are looking to optimize the SEO aspect of your website, then you cannot ignore the importance of its site’s URLs. Search engines like Google tend to give special consideration to the structure of URLs when indexing content.

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

Now … let’s see why it’s best to configure your permalinks in WordPress.

Typically, a default 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 find information inside your database. It doesn’t really mean much to anyone, and it doesn’t help your website with on-site SEO.

As the screenshot taken from Google search listings below shows, many WordPress site owners are still using out of the box settings when publishing their content …

Although Google is still indexing the above sites, these site owners are potentially missing out on additional SEO benefits.

To get the best SEO benefit out of 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 characters.

WordPress offers the ability to create a custom URL structure for your published posts, so your content can easily go from something that is non-SEO friendly like this …

To this …

By default, WordPress post URLs are not very SEO-friendly. In this tutorial, you will learn how to set up your WP permalinks to help your content get better indexing in search engines.

Changing WordPress Permalinks

Log into your WP admin and select 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 will need to specify a different Permalink structure than the default one.

Common Settings

In the Common Settings section, select Custom Structure, then add one or more ‘tags’ (see below) to create SEO-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/top-ten-european-cruise-destinations

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=9882

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

Creating Search Engine-Friendly Tags In WordPress

“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, displayed as four digits (e.g. ‘2012’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘03’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘27’)
• %hour% – The hour your post gets published (e.g. ‘02’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘38’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘16’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘2353’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of your post title. For example, if your post title is ”Ten Signs That You’re About To Get Fired From Your Job!”, the postname tag will convert this into “ten-signs-that-youre-about-to-get-fired-from-your-job” (all lower case characters and exclamation marks removed) in the URL. Tip: You can edit the words 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 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 ‘Custom Structure’.

Optional Permalink Settings

This section lets you set up custom structures for your category and tag pages.

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

• 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/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 WordPress uses the defaults.

Remember to save any changes when 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 – Additional Info

Use Short, Descriptive Categories

To get the optimal 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 Joost de Valk, here are some things 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 slug 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 decrease 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 category vs no category there really is no ideal permalink structure to use. Use the permalink structure that you think will suit your needs best. Your web addresses should be short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We cover WordPress categories in another article.

Create Timeless Posts

Another useful tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your aim is to run a news site or there is a special reason why you need to create dated post addresses, it’s best to avoid choosing date-based permalink syntax when configuring your URLs.

(Avoid setting up URL structures that date your posts)

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 Blog Already Has Published Content?

Normally, your permalinks should be set up when you perform a new WordPress installation. This should be part of your site planning process.

If your website or blog has been running for a while 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 absolutely something that needs to be done, as making changes to permalinks after your site has been up and running for a while could create SEO issues and loss of traffic.

301 Redirects

As you’ve seen earlier, many WordPress users (or whoever set up their site) are unaware of the permalinks 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 or blog was originally set up to display post dates in your web address and now all of your content is perceived as being out-of-date and you want to remove the date portion in your URLs.

To change your permalink structure without affecting your site’s SEO or existing rankings in a negative way you should use ‘301 redirections’ to point links set up using the old permalinks syntax to links using the new permalinks structure.

A ’301′ code is interpreted by search engines as a link that has been permanently relocated. 301 redirection is the most efficient and search engine friendly way to redirect users to new website destinations and avoid ‘404’ (Page not found) errors if clicking on an old link.

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

You can WordPress site or blog 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 any 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 below:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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