Wouldn’t it be great if after adding a new post to your WordPress website or blog, the following could happen … just from your post URL:

• Users could assess what the post is about,
• Search engines would find your posts faster,
• Every single content item published on your site would have a unique identifier, making things easier to manage.

Well, with permalinks you can!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – Definition

Permalinks are the permanent URLs to an individual WordPress post, category, or other taxonomy (a way to organize things together) like archives.

A permalink is the web address that other people use to link to your posts or sections of your site or the links you send in emails pointing readers to articles on your site. Some people also refer to permalinks as “pretty” URLs.

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

Why Use Permalinks?

Hopefully, you probably know by now that, WordPress is one of the best CMS applications available 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 considerably fine tuned with SEO plugins.

If you are looking to optimize the SEO aspect of your site, then you cannot ignore the importance of your site’s URLs. Google tends to give special consideration to the structure of a site’s URLs when indexing site pages.

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

Now … let’s see the reason why you should use permalinks when publishing content in WordPress.

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

WordPress uses the above link with a string query to locate information within your database. It doesn’t really mean anything to either search engines or visitors, and it doesn’t help your site with on-site search engine optimization.

As you can see from the image below taken directly from Google search listings, many WordPress site owners haven’t set up their sites to use permalinks …

Although these sites are still getting their content indexed on search engines, these site owners are potentially missing out on additional SEO benefits.

To get greater 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 posts, so your pages can go from this …

To something like this …

By default, WordPress post URLs are not very search engine-friendly. This step-by-step tutorial explains how to configure the Permalinks section of your WordPress site to help your content rank better in search engines like Google.

How To Configure Your WordPress Permalinks

Log into your WordPress dashboard and 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 “pretty” permalink instead for our posts. To do this, we will need to specify a different Permalink structure than the default one.

Common Permalink Settings

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/budget-cruises/river-cruise-holiday-deals

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=6349

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

WordPress Permalink Tags

“Pretty” URLs, or search engine-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. ‘2014’)
• %monthnum% – The month the post gets published (e.g. ‘10’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘03’)
• %hour% – The hour the post gets published (e.g. ‘20’)
• %minute% – The minute the post is published (e.g. ‘39’)
• %second% – The exact second your post gets published (e.g. ‘31’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘2131’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted version of your post title. For example, if the post title is ”Ten Best Hotels In Cote D’Azur!”, the postname tag will convert this into “ten-best-hotels-in-cote-dazur” (all characters converted to lower case and punctuation marks deleted) in the URL. Tip: You can always edit the words in your post titles 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 choosing the ‘Custom Structure’ setting and adding the /%postname%/ tag.

Optional Permalink Settings

This section lets you configure custom structures for your tag and category page URLs.

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

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

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

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

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

To this …

If you leave the optional settings fields blank the default settings will be used.

Remember to save your changes when 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 Information

Set Up Your Categories

To get the greatest 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 and author of the WordPress SEO plugin Joost de Valk, here are a few things to keep in mind if you are wondering whether or not to add categories to your permalink structure:

• If your category slug is short and descriptive (e.g. uses a relevant keyword or keyword phrase), 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 and reduce the SEO benefit.
• If you plan 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 is no ”better” permalink structure to use. Choose the permalink structure you think will suit your site best. Your post URLs should be short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We provide detailed information about WordPress categories in another tutorial.

Avoid Using Time-Stamping Permalinks

Another tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your site is a news blog or there is a special reason why you need to date your content, it’s best to avoid choosing date-based permalink syntax for your URLs.

(Avoid setting up permalinks that time-stamp your posts)

Although using URL structures that date your posts is better that using no permalinks at all from an SEO aspect, visitors are less likely to click on posts that are a couple of years old, even if the content is relevant to what they are searching for.

Changing The Permalink Structure In An Established Site

Normally, your site’s permalinks should be configured when you install a new WordPress site. This should be part of your site 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 doing so can create SEO issues and errors.

301 Redirects

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

Maybe you started out using the default WordPress permalinks and now you would like to improve your site’s SEO. Perhaps your website was originally set up to display post dates in your web address and now all of your content is perceived as being outdated and you want to delete the date portion in the permalinks.

To edit your permalink structure without negatively impacting your site’s SEO or existing rankings you should add ‘301 redirects’ to reassign all links using the previous permalink syntax to web URLs using the new structure.

Search engines interpret a code ‘301’ as a link that has permanently relocated to another address. 301 redirects are the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect visitors to new website destinations and avoid ”page not found” errors when they click on an old link.

To effectively change your permalink syntax and avoid damaging your rankings, 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 WordPress 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 redirects using a WP plugin or get professional help)

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

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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