Wouldn’t it be great if you could add a new post to your WordPress website or blog, and the following happened … all from your page address:

• Potential site visitors could quickly assess what your post was about,
• Google could easily discover your page and correctly index your content for better search results,
• Every piece of content you create on your website or blog would have a unique ID, making your content easier to manage.

Well, with WordPress permalinks you can!

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 organize things together) like archives.

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

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

Permalinks – Why Use Them?

As you probably know, WordPress is one of the best CMS applications you can use when it comes to SEO.

WordPress is not only great for SEO out of the box, but there are excellent SEO plugins you can use that will help to finetune its SEO aspect further.

If you focus on the SEO aspect of your website, then you cannot ignore the importance of your URLs. Google tends to pay special attention to the structure of your site’s URLs when indexing its site pages.

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

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

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

The above link structure is used by WordPress to locate information inside its database. It doesn’t really help your website with on-site search engine optimization.

As you can see from the screenshot below taken directly from Google search results, many site owners are still using default permalink settings when publishing their content online …

Although Google is still indexing the above sites, they are potentially missing out on extra SEO benefits.

To get the maximum SEO benefit out of using WordPress and improve your site’s traffic results, you will want to make sure to set up your permalinks structure to make it more SEO-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 easily go from something that is non-SEO friendly like this …

To this …

In this step-by-step tutorial, you will learn how to configure your WordPress permalinks to display your posts with SEO-friendly URLs instead of the default URL structure and help every new post you publish get better indexing results in search engines like Google.

Changing WordPress Permalinks

In your WordPress main menu, 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 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 – Permalinks

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/travel-europe/romantic-cruise-holiday-deals

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=24

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

Pretty URL Tags

“Pretty” URLs, or SEO-friendly URLs, are created by adding one or more ‘tags’ in the Custom Structure field:

• %year% – The year your post is published, displayed as four digits (e.g. ‘2011’)
• %monthnum% – The month the post is published (e.g. ‘09’)
• %day% – The day the post gets published (e.g. ‘11’)
• %hour% – The hour the post gets published (e.g. ‘14’)
• %minute% – The minute the post is published (e.g. ‘22’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘12’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘8944’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted version of your 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 letters converted to lower case and exclamation symbols removed) in the URL. Tip: You can edit this text 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 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 set up custom permalinks for your tag and category page URLs here is where you would do this.

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

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

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

So, if you make the following change in your permalinks Optional > Category base settings section …

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 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 Information

Categories

To get more 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 expert Joost de Valk, here are some points to consider if you are wondering whether or not to add categories to your permalinks:

• 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 share and reduce the SEO benefit.
• If you are going 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 category vs no category there really is no ideal 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 cover WordPress categories in another tutorial.

Don’t Use Date Permalinks

Another great tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your website is a news site or there is a special reason why you need to add dates to your post URLs, it’s best to avoid selecting date-based permalink syntax when setting up your site’s URLs.

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

Visitors 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.

Changing Permalinks In Blog With Many Published Posts

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

If your website or blog is already established or your site already has many posts indexed in the search engines and you would like to change the permalink structure, make sure that this is absolutely something that needs doing, as doing so could create issues and errors.

Use 301 Redirects

As you’ve seen in the above screenshots of actual search results, some WordPress users (or their web developers) are completely unaware of the SEO-friendly URLs feature of WordPress.

Maybe you started out using 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 URLs and now all of your posts are showing as being old and you want to delete the date portion in your URLs.

The best way to change your permalink structure without affecting your site’s SEO or rankings in a negative way is to use ‘301 redirects’ to point all links using the old URL syntax to web addresses that use the new permalink syntax.

Search engines interpret a ’301′ code as a link that has permanently been relocated to another address. 301 redirects are the most efficient and search engine friendly way to redirect users to new web page destinations and avoid running into page errors if clicking on an old link.

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

You can add a link redirection system to your site using a WP redirection plugin like Simple 301 Redirects, or Redirection, or get a professional to help you set up and redirect your permalinks correctly to avoid any problems and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up 301 redirections using a WP plugin or get professional assistance)

Congratulations! Now you know how to change your WordPress site or blog to display SEO-friendly URLs for your posts and improve your search search rankings. For additional information on using Permalinks, refer to the official WordPress documentation below:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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