Wouldn’t it be great if you could simply publish new content on your WordPress site, and the following happened … all from your post URL:

• Users could gain an understanding of what your post is about,
• Google would discover your pages faster,
• Every item of content published on your website would have a unique ID, 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?

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 articles or sections of your site or the links you send in an email pointing readers to a particular post on your blog. Some people also call permalinks “pretty” URLs.

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

Why Do You Need To Use Permalinks?

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

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

If you are looking to optimize the SEO aspect of your site, then you should not ignore the importance of your URLs. Search engines like Google tend to pay special attention to 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 it’s best to use permalinks in WordPress.

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

The link structure shown above is used by WordPress to locate information inside its database. It doesn’t really mean anything to search engines or visitors, and it doesn’t help your website with on-site SEO.

As the screenshot image below shows, many site owners are still using default permalink settings when publishing their content online …

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

To get optimal SEO benefit out of using and improve your site’s rankings, 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 numbers and symbols.

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

To this …

In this tutorial, you will learn how to configure the Permalinks section of your WordPress site to display posts using SEO-friendly URLs instead of the out-of-the-box URL structure and help every new post you publish on your site automatically get better indexing results in Google.

Setting Up Your WordPress Permalinks

From your WP dashboard menu, click on Settings > Permalinks …

This brings 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 “pretty” permalinks 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 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-european-river-cruise-destinations

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=4876

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

WordPress Permalink Tags

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

• %year% – The year of the post, four digits (e.g. ‘2011’)
• %monthnum% – The month the post is published (e.g. ‘01’)
• %day% – The day the post gets published (e.g. ‘07’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘04’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘08’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘08’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘1445’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of the 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 letters converted to lower case and punctuation marks deleted) in the URL. Tip: You can always edit the URL text 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 adding the /%postname%/ tag in ‘Custom Structure’.

Optional Permalink Settings

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

You can change the ‘base’ category or tag URLs using the following syntax:

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

For example, using “topics” as your category base will make your category links display as ‘http://domain.com/topics/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 these fields blank WordPress uses the defaults.

Remember to save your changes after you have 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 Info

Set Up Categories

To get the optimal benefit out of using Permalinks, you will need 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 some points to consider if you are wondering whether you should add categories to your permalinks 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 categories 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 or copy 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.

Ultimately, when it comes to category vs no category there really is no ”better” 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 provide more information about WordPress categories in other articles.

Don’t Use Date Permalinks

Another great tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your website is a news site or you have a special reason to create dated post addresses, avoid choosing date-based permalink options when configuring your URLs.

(Avoid setting up permalinks that date your content)

Although using URL structures that time-stamp your content may be considered better that using no permalinks at all from an SEO perspective, people 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 Site Already Has Lots Of Content?

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

If your site is already established or your site already has a lot of content 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 doing so can create issues and loss of traffic.

301 Redirection

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

Maybe you started out using the default WordPress URL structure and now you want to optimize your site better for search engines. Maybe your site was configured to display post dates in your web address and now all of your posts are perceived as being outdated and you want to delete the date portion of your URLs.

To edit your permalinks without negatively affecting your site’s SEO or existing rankings you should use ‘301 redirections’ to reassign links that use the previous permalinks structure to links using the new structure.

A ’301′ code is interpreted by search engines as a link that has permanently relocated to another address. 301 redirection is the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect users to new website destinations and avoid running into page errors when following an old link.

To create an effective syntax change 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 WP site 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 issues and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up 301 redirects using a WordPress redirection plugin or use the services of a professional)

Congratulations! Now you know how to change your WordPress site or blog to display SEO-friendly URLs for your posts and improve your search results. For additional information on using Permalinks, see the WordPress codex here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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