Wouldn’t it be great if after adding a new post to your WordPress website, the following happened … just from your web address:

• New visitors could glean what the content was about,
• Search engines could easily discover your page and correctly classify the content for better search results,
• Each content item created on your site would have its own unique identifier, making your site easier to manage.

Well, with permalinks this can easily be done!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – What Are They?

Permalinks are the permanent URLs to your individual posts, categories and other taxonomies (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 a specific post on your site. Permalinks are often referred to as “pretty” URLs.

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

Why Do You Need To Use Permalinks?

As you are probably aware, WordPress is one of the best CMS tools available when it comes to SEO.

WordPress is not only well optimized right out of the box, but there are excellent SEO plugins you can use that can help to improve its SEO aspect considerably.

If you focus on the SEO aspect of your website, then you should not ignore the importance of your URLs. Google places considerable weight on the URL structure of a site.

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

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

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

WordPress uses the link structure with a string query shown above to locate data inside your database. It does not mean anything to either visitors or search engines, and it doesn’t help your site with on-site SEO.

As the screenshot image taken directly from Google search listings below shows, many WordPress users are still using default permalink settings when publishing their content …

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

To get greater SEO benefit out of using WordPress and improve your site’s rankings, 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 gives you the ability to create a custom URL structure for your published and archived posts, so your content can go from something that is non-SEO friendly like this …

To this …

In this tutorial, you will learn how to configure the Permalinks section of your WordPress site to display your posts with search engine-friendly URLs instead of the default URL structure and help every new post you add get better indexing results in search engines like Google.

How To Set Up Your WordPress Permalinks

In your WordPress administration section select, Settings > Permalinks …

This brings 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 search engine friendly URL 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 …

(Change 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/cruise-holiday-deals

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=8303

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

WordPress Permalink Tags

“Pretty” permalinks, 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. ‘12’)
• %day% – The day your post is published (e.g. ‘10’)
• %hour% – The hour the post gets published (e.g. ‘02’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘43’)
• %second% – The exact second the post is published (e.g. ‘10’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘24’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted version of your post title. For example, if the 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 characters converted to lower case and removed exclamation marks) in the URL. Tip: You can edit the URL wording 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 adding the /%postname%/ tag in ‘Custom Structure’.

Optional Permalink Settings

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

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

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

For example, using “news” as your category base would display your category links as ‘http://domain.com/news/uncategorized/’.

So, if you enter the following in your permalinks Optional > Category base settings field …

Your ‘category archives’ page URL will go from this …

To something like this …

If you leave the fields blank the defaults will be used.

Remember to save your 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 – Tips

Set Up Your Categories

To get the optimal SEO benefit out of 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 Joost de Valk, here are a few points to consider if you are wondering whether or not to add categories to your permalink structure:

• If your domain is short and your category is short and descriptive (e.g. uses a relevant keyword or keyword phrase), you may want to add the category tag 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 reduce the SEO benefit.
• Do you plan to post content under only one category or multiple categories? 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 category vs no category there is no ideal permalink structure to use. Choose the permalink structure that you think will suit your site best. Many SEO experts recommend making your post URLs short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We cover WordPress categories in other articles.

Make Your Posts Timeless

Another great tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your site is a news blog or you have a special reason to date your site’s content, it’s best to avoid selecting date-based permalinks when configuring your URLs.

(Avoid using permalinks that time-stamp your posts)

Although using permalinks that date your content may be considered better that using no permalinks at all from an SEO perspective, visitors are less likely to click on posts that are several years old, even if the content is relevant to what they are searching for.

What If My Blog Has Published Posts?

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

If your website 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 really something that needs doing, as changing permalinks after your site has already been up and running for a while could create SEO issues and errors.

301 Redirection

As you’ve seen in earlier screenshots, some WordPress site owners (or their web developers) seem to be 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 originally set up to display post dates in your URLs and now all of your content is perceived as being out-of-date and you want to delete the date tags of your permalinks.

The best way to modify your URL structure without affecting your site’s SEO in a negative way is to use ‘301 redirects’ to reassign links that were set up using the previous URL syntax to links that use the new structure.

Search engines interpret a ’301′ code as a link that has permanently moved to another location. 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 when they click on an old link.

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

You can site using a WP redirection 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 any problems and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up 301 redirections using plugins or use the services of a professional)

Congratulations! Now you know how to change your site to display SEO-friendly URLs for your posts. For additional information on using Permalinks, refer to the official WordPress documentation here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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