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

• Visitors could tell what your post is about,
• Google could find your pages faster,
• Every content item you create on your website or blog would have a unique identifier, making things easier to manage.

Well, with WordPress permalinks this is very easy to do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

What Is A Permalink?

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

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

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

Why Use Permalinks?

Hopefully, by now you probably know that, WordPress is one of the best CMS applications available when it comes to publishing search optimized content.

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

If you focus on the SEO aspect of your site, then you should not ignore the importance of its site’s URLs. Search engines like Google place considerable weight on the URL structure of a site.

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

Now … let’s review the reason why you may need to use permalinks if publishing content 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 above link structure with a string query to find data inside its database. It does not mean much to anyone, and it doesn’t help your site with on-site search engine optimization.

As the screenshot taken from Google search results below shows, many WordPress users are still using out of the box settings when publishing their content online …

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

To get the best possible SEO benefit out of using and improve your site’s traffic results, you will want to make sure to set up your permalinks structure to make it more search engine-friendly by displaying relevant keywords in your URL, instead of meaningless numbers and symbols.

WordPress lets you create a custom URL structure for your published and archived posts, so your content can easily go from something that is non-SEO friendly like this …

To this …

By default, WordPress post URLs are not very search engine-friendly. In this tutorial, you will learn how to configure your WordPress permalinks to help you get better indexing results in Google.

Configuring WordPress Permalinks

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

Common Settings

In the Common Settings section, select Custom Structure, then add one or more ‘tags’ (see below) to create search engine-friendly URLs …

(Set up 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/river-cruise-holiday-deals

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=116

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

Search Engine-Friendly Tags

“Pretty” URLs, 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, displayed as four digits (e.g. ‘2013’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘02’)
• %day% – The day your post is published (e.g. ‘26’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘22’)
• %minute% – The minute your post gets published (e.g. ‘29’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘22’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘7135’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of the post title. For example, if your post title is ”Ten Signs That You’re About To Get Fired From Your Job!”, the postname tag will convert this into “ten-signs-that-youre-about-to-get-fired-from-your-job” (all letters converted to lower case and punctuation symbols deleted) in the URL. Tip: You can always edit the wording in your post title 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 choosing the ‘Custom Structure’ setting and using the /%postname%/ tag.

Permalinks – Optional 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 structure:

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

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

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

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

To something like this …

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

Remember to save your 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 – Additional Info

Use Short, Descriptive Categories

To get maximum SEO benefit from using Permalinks, it’s important 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 things to keep in mind if you are wondering whether you should add categories to your permalink structure or not:

• If your domain is short and your category name 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 copy and decrease 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 adding category vs no category there is no ”better” permalink structure to use. Choose a permalink structure that you think will suit your needs best. Your web address should be short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We provide detailed information about WordPress categories in another article.

Don’t Use Date Permalinks

Another useful tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your goal is to run a news website or there is a special reason why you need to date your content, avoid selecting date-based permalink options when configuring your blog’s URLs.

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

Although setting up URL structures that date your content is better that using no permalinks at all from an SEO point-of-view, people are less likely to click on posts that are a couple of years old, even if the content is relevant to the answers they are searching for.

What About Established Sites?

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

If your site has been running for a while or your site already has many posts indexed in the search engines and you want to change the permalink structure, make sure that this is something that absolutely needs doing, as making changes to permalinks after your site has already been running for a while could create SEO issues and errors.

301 Redirects

As you’ve seen earlier, some website owners (or their web developers) seem to be completely unaware of the permalinks 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. Perhaps your website was originally set up to display post dates in your web address and now all of your posts are showing as being old and you want to delete the date portion of your permalinks.

The best way to modify your permalink structure without impacting your site’s SEO in a negative way is to add ‘301 redirections’ to point links that use the previous permalink syntax to page URLs using the new permalinks syntax.

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 visitors to new site destinations and avoid running into page errors if they click on an old link.

To effectively change your syntax and avoid SEO problems, sending visitors to error pages, etc. you should add a redirection system before changing the permalink structure of your site.

You can WordPress site or blog 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 use the services of a professional)

Congratulations! Now you know about the built-in system WordPress uses to display SEO-friendly URLs for your posts. To learn more about using Permalinks, see the WordPress codex here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

***