Wouldn’t it be great if you could add a new post to your site, and the following would then happen … all from your page address:

• Site readers could easily assess what the page is about,
• Search engines would be able to find your pages faster,
• Every post on your website would have a unique ID, making your site easier to manage.

Well, with permalinks you can!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

What Is A Permalink?

A permalink is the permanent URL to your individual posts, categories and other taxonomies (a way to group things together) like archives.

A permalink is the URL that other people use to link to your articles or sections of your site or the links you send in an email pointing readers to posts on your site. Permalinks are often called “pretty” URLs.

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

Why Do You Need To Use Permalinks?

As you are probably aware, WordPress is one of the best CMS tools available when it comes to SEO.

WordPress is not only great for SEO out of the box, but its SEO aspect can be easily fine tuned using SEO plugins.

If you focus on the SEO aspect of your site or blog, then you cannot ignore the importance of its site’s URLs. Search engines like Google tend to give special consideration to the structure of URLs when indexing content.

Permalinks can be 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 see why you may need to configure your permalinks when publishing content in WordPress.

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

The link structure shown above is used by WordPress to locate information within your 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 below shows, many WordPress users are still using default permalink settings when publishing content online …

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

To get optimal SEO benefit from using WordPress and improve your site’s rankings, you will want to make sure to configure your permalinks structure to make it more search engine-friendly by displaying relevant keywords in your URL, instead of meaningless numbers and symbols.

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

To this …

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

Setting Up Your WordPress Permalinks

Log into your WP 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 search engine friendly URLs instead for our posts. To do this, we need to specify a different Permalink structure than the default one.

Permalinks > Common 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 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/cruise-travel/how-to-save-money-on-cruise-travel

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=2549

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

How To Use Permalink Tags In Custom Structure

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

• %year% – The year your post is published, four digits (e.g. ‘2010’)
• %monthnum% – The month the post gets published (e.g. ‘10’)
• %day% – The day the post is published (e.g. ‘30’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘23’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘32’)
• %second% – The exact second your post is published (e.g. ‘50’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘2585’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted version of your 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 exclamation symbols deleted) in the URL. Tip: You can edit the words 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 adding the /%postname%/ tag in the ‘Custom Structure’ setting.

Optional Permalink Settings

This section lets you configure custom structures for your category and tag archive pages.

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

• 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/category_name/’.

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

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

To this …

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

Remember to save any 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 – Tips

Use Short, Descriptive Categories

To get the best possible 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 plugin developer 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 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 decrease the SEO benefit.
• If you plan to post content under multiple categories, then we recommend not using the category tag in your permalink structure.

Despite being the subject of intense debate in WordPress SEO circles, when it comes to adding category vs no category there really is no ideal permalink structure to use. Use the permalink structure that you think will suit your needs best. Your post URLs should be short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We cover WordPress categories in other articles.

Create Timeless Posts

Another tip from Joost de Valk is that unless you run a news blog or you have a special reason to add dates to your post URLs, it’s best to avoid selecting date-based permalink settings when configuring your site’s URLs.

(Avoid using permalinks that date your posts)

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

What If My Site Already Has Published Posts?

Normally, your permalinks should be set up when you install a new WordPress site. This should be part of your site planning process.

If your website has been running for a while 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 absolutely something that needs doing, as making changes to permalinks after your site has 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, some WordPress site owners (or their web developers) are unaware of the search-friendly URLs feature of WordPress.

Maybe you started out using the default WordPress permalinks and now you would like to optimize your site better for search engines. Perhaps your website or blog was originally set up to display post dates in your URLs and now all of your content is showing as being old and you want to delete the date portion of the URLs.

To modify your permalink structure without impacting your site’s SEO in a negative way you will need to add ‘301 redirections’ to point links that were set up using the old URL syntax to web addresses using the new syntax.

A ’301′ code is interpreted by search engines as a link that has permanently moved. 301 redirection is the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect visitors to new site destinations and avoid page errors when clicking on an old link.

To create an effective syntax change and avoid damaging your search rankings, sending visitors to broken links, etc. you will need to set up a redirection system before changing the permalink structure of your site.

You can WordPress site using redirection plugins like Simple 301 Redirects, or Redirection, or use the services of a professional to help you set up and redirect your permalinks correctly to avoid problems and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up a redirection system using plugins or get professional help)

Congratulations! Now you know how to change your site 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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