Wouldn’t it be great if you could just add content to your WordPress website, and the following took place … all from your URL:

• Readers could easily determine what the post was about,
• Search engines would easily discover your posts and correctly index their content for better search rankings,
• Every item of content added to your website or blog would have a unique identifier, making things easier to manage.

Well, with permalinks this is really easy to do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – What Are They?

A permalink is the permanent URL to your individual posts, categories and other taxonomies (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 your posts. Some people also call permalinks “pretty” URLs.

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

Permalinks – Why Use Them?

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

WordPress is not only well optimized straight out of the box, but there are SEO plugins you can install that will help to enhance its SEO aspect considerably.

If you are looking to optimize the SEO aspect of your website, then you should not ignore the importance of its URLs. Google places considerable weight on the URL structure of your site.

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

Now … let’s see why you should set up permalinks in WordPress.

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

WordPress uses the link structure with a string query shown above to locate data inside your database. It does not help your website with on-site SEO.

As you can see from the screenshot image below, many site owners haven’t set up their permalinks …

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

To get the best possible 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 gives you the ability to create a custom URL structure for your published and archived posts, so your pages can go from this …

To something with an SEO-friendly URL like 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 add automatically get better indexing results in search engines like Google.

Configuring Your WordPress Permalinks

In your WordPress administration menu, select Settings > Permalinks …

This will bring 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 “pretty” permalinks instead for our posts. To do this, we 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 …

(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/five-favorite-european-river-cruises

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=651

(Using post name permalinks helps readers and search engines understand what your post 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 of the post, four digits (e.g. ‘2015’)
• %monthnum% – The month the post gets published (e.g. ‘11’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘29’)
• %hour% – The hour your post is published (e.g. ‘07’)
• %minute% – The minute the post gets published (e.g. ‘15’)
• %second% – The exact second your post gets published (e.g. ‘34’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘9101’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of the 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 removed punctuation symbols) in the URL. Tip: You can edit the words in your post title 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 the ‘Custom Structure’ setting and using the /%postname%/ tag.

Optional Permalink Settings

In this section, you can set custom structures for your category and tag URLs.

This changes the ‘base’ tag or category 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 would display your category links as ‘http://domain.com/topics/category_name/’.

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

Your ‘category archives’ page URL will change 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 – Tips

Use Short, Descriptive Categories

To get the optimal SEO benefit from 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 a few points to keep in mind if you are wondering whether or not to add categories to your permalinks:

• If your category slug is short and descriptive (e.g. uses a relevant keyword or keyword phrase), you may want to add categories 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.
• 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 category vs no category there really 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 site’s web addresses short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We provide detailed information about WordPress categories in another tutorial.

Create Timeless Posts

Another great tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your website provides news, or you have any special reason to create dated web addresses, avoid selecting date-based permalink settings when setting up your URLs.

(Avoid using permalinks that time-stamp your posts)

Although setting up URL structures that date your posts is better that using no permalinks at all from an SEO perspective, people are less likely to click on a post if it is several years old, even if the content is relevant to what they are searching for.

Changing Permalinks In An Established Site

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

If your website is already established or you have a lot of content already indexed in the search engines and you want to change the permalink structure, make sure that this is really necessary, as making changes to permalinks after your site has been up and running for a while could create issues and loss of traffic.

Use 301 Redirects

As you’ve seen earlier, some WordPress site owners (or whoever set up their site) seem to be unaware of the permalinks feature of WordPress.

Maybe when you started, your site used the default WordPress permalinks and now you would like to optimize your site better for search engines. Perhaps your website was configured to display post dates in your web address and now all of your content is showing as being 2-3 years old and you want to delete the date portion in your permalinks.

The best way to change your permalink structure without impacting your site’s SEO or rankings in a negative way is to use ‘301 redirections’ to reassign all links that were set up using the old permalinks syntax to post URLs using the new 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 website destinations and avoid ”page not found” errors when they click on an old link.

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

You can add a link redirection system to your site or blog using a 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 redirections using a WP plugin or get professional assistance)

Congratulations! Now you know about the built-in system WordPress uses to display SEO-friendly URLs for your posts and improve your search results. To learn more about using Permalinks, see the official WordPress documentation below:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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