Wouldn’t it be great if you could add content to your website or blog, and the following took place … all from your web address:

• Potential site visitors could easily assess what the content is about,
• Search engines would be able to easily discover your page and correctly classify its content for better search results,
• Every piece of content added to your website would have its own unique ID, making your content easier to manage.

Well, this is what WordPress permalinks let you do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – Definition

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 other people will use to link to your articles or sections of your site or the links you send in emails pointing to a specific post on your website. Some people also call permalinks “pretty” URLs.

Permalinks make the web address pointing to each post on your blog permanent, hence a permalink.

Why Use Permalinks?

Hopefully, you are probably aware that, 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 its SEO aspect can be considerably improved using excellent SEO plugins.

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

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

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

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

WordPress uses the link with a string query shown above to find data within its database. It doesn’t really mean much to anyone, and it doesn’t help your site with on-site search engine optimization.

As the screenshot image taken directly from Google search results below shows, many WordPress users haven’t set up their permalinks to publish search optimized content online …

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

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

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

To this …

By default, WordPress URLs are not very SEO-friendly. This tutorial shows you how to configure your permalinks in WordPress to display your posts with search engine-friendly URLs.

Setting Up WordPress Permalinks

In your WP admin menu, 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 search engine friendly URLs instead for our posts. To do this, we will need to specify a different Permalink structure than the one set by default.

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 …

(Change 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-deals/cruise-holiday-deals

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=953

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

Search Engine-Friendly Tags

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

• %year% – The year the post gets published, four digits (e.g. ‘2013’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘04’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘08’)
• %hour% – The hour the post gets published (e.g. ‘06’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘44’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘05’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘417’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted version of your post title. For example, if your post title is ”It Ain’t Worth Doin’ No More!”, the postname tag will convert this into “it-aint-worth-doin-no-more” (all lower case characters and punctuation marks deleted) in the URL. Tip: You can always 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 selecting ‘Custom Structure’ and adding the /%postname%/ tag.

Optional Permalink Settings

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

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

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

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

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

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

To something like this …

If you leave the fields blank WordPress uses the default settings.

Remember to save any changes after 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 – Tips

Use Short, Descriptive Categories

To get greater SEO 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 points to consider if you are wondering whether you should add categories to your permalink structure or not:

• If your category slug is short and descriptive (e.g. adds a relevant keyword or keyword phrase to your URL), 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 reduce 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 adding category vs no category there is no ”better” permalink structure to use. We recommend choosing the permalink structure you think will suit your needs best and that will make your post URLs short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We provide detailed information about WordPress categories in another article.

Avoid Setting Up Permalinks That Time-Stamp Your Content

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

(Avoid setting up permalinks that date your content)

Although using permalinks that time-stamp your content may be considered better that using no permalinks at all from an SEO point-of-view, 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.

Changing Permalinks In An Established Blog

Normally, it’s best to configure your permalinks when you perform a new WordPress installation. This should be part of your website planning process.

If your site is already established 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 changing permalinks after your site has already been running for a while could create issues and loss of traffic.

301 Redirection

As you’ve seen in the above screenshots of actual search results, many website owners (or their web developers) seem to be unaware of the search-friendly URLs feature of WordPress.

Maybe you started out using the default WordPress URL structure and now you want to improve your site’s SEO. Maybe your website or blog was configured 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 portion of the permalinks.

To edit your URL structure without negatively impacting your site’s SEO or rankings you will need to use ‘301 redirections’ to point links set up using the previous URL syntax to page URLs using the new permalinks structure.

Search engines interpret a code ‘301’ as a link that has permanently relocated. 301 redirection is the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect visitors to new site destinations and avoid ‘404’ (Page not found) errors when they click on an old link.

To create an effective permalink syntax change and avoid damaging your rankings, sending visitors to error pages, etc. you will need to add a redirection system before changing the permalink structure of your site.

You can WordPress site using plugins 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 redirection plugins or get professional help)

Congratulations! Now you know how to change your WordPress site to display search engine-friendly URLs for your posts and improve your search results. To learn more about using Permalinks, see the official WordPress documentation here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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