Wouldn’t it be great if after adding content to your WordPress site, the following could take place … all from your post URL:

• New visitors could determine what the content is about,
• Search engines could discover your pages faster,
• Every post published on your site would have a unique ID, making your content easier to manage.

Well, with permalinks this can easily be done!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – Definition

Permalinks are the permanent URLs to your individual WordPress posts, categories and other taxonomies (a way to organize things together) like archives.

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

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

Why Do You Need To Use Permalinks?

As you probably know, WordPress is one of the best CMS applications available when it comes to SEO.

WordPress is not only well optimized straight out of the box, but there are SEO plugins you can use that can 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 your site’s URLs. Search engines like Google place 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 aesthetics, usability, and forward-compatibility of your links.

Now … let’s turn our attention to why it’s best to configure your permalinks if publishing content in WordPress.

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

WordPress uses the link structure shown above to locate data 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 site owners haven’t yet set up their sites to publish search optimized content online …

Although Google is still indexing the above sites, they are potentially missing out on extra SEO benefits.

To get the greatest SEO benefit from using 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 offers the ability to create a custom URL structure for your published posts, so your content can easily go from something that is non-SEO friendly like this …

To something like this …

In this step-by-step tutorial, you will learn how to configure the Permalinks section of your WordPress site to display your posts with search engine-friendly URLs instead of the default URL structure and help every new post you add to your site automatically get better indexing results in search engines like Google.

How To Set Up WordPress Permalinks

Log into your WP administration section and select Settings > Permalinks …

This brings 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 search engine friendly URLs instead for our posts. To do this, we will need to specify a different Permalink structure than the one set by default.

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 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/cruise-holiday-deals

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=7667

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

Adding Pretty URL Tags In Custom Structure

“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. ‘2013’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘11’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘05’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘19’)
• %minute% – The minute the post gets published (e.g. ‘03’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘32’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘3891’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted version of the post title. For example, if your 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 no punctuation symbols) in the URL. Tip: You can edit this 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 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 adding the /%postname%/ tag.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

If you need to set up custom permalinks for your category and tag URLs you can do this in this section.

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

So, if you enter the following 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 optional settings fields blank the default settings will be used.

Remember to save your changes when 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 – Tips

Set Up Categories

To get the optimal SEO benefit out of 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 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 domain is short and your category slug is short and descriptive (e.g. adds a relevant keyword or keyword phrase to your URL), you may want to use the category tag 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 or share and decrease the SEO benefit.
• If you are going 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 really is no perfect permalink structure to use. We recommend choosing the permalink structure you think will suit your site best and that will make your site’s web addresses short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We provide more information about WordPress categories in another article.

Avoid Using Permalink Syntaxes That Time-Stamp Your Content

Another tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your site provides news, or there is a special reason why you need to create dated website addresses, avoid using date-based permalink settings for your blog’s URLs.

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

Although using permalinks that time-stamp your content may be considered better that using no permalinks at all from an SEO aspect, visitors are less likely to click on a post that is several years old, even if the content is relevant to what they are searching for.

Changing Permalinks In An Established Blog

Normally, your site’s permalinks should be configured when you create a new WordPress site. This should be part of your website planning process.

If your site is already established or your site already has a lot of posts indexed in the search engines and you want to change the permalink structure, make sure that this is absolutely something that needs to be done, as making changes to permalinks after your site has already been running for a while can create issues and loss of traffic.

Use 301 Redirection

As you’ve seen in earlier screenshots, many WordPress users (or their web developers) are completely unaware of the permalinks feature of WordPress.

Maybe when you started, your site used the default WordPress URL structure and now you would like to improve your site’s SEO. Maybe your site was configured to display post dates in your URLs and now all of your content is showing as being two or three years old and you want to delete the date tags in your URLs.

The best way to edit your permalinks without affecting your site’s SEO or rankings in a negative way is to add ‘301 redirections’ to point all links set up using the previous permalink syntax to URLs that use the new permalinks syntax.

A code ‘301’ is interpreted by search engines as a link that has permanently moved to another destination. 301 redirects are the most efficient and search engine friendly way to redirect visitors to new web page destinations and avoid running into ”page not found” errors if clicking on an old link.

To effectively change your syntax and avoid damaging your search rankings, sending visitors to error pages, etc. you will need to install and set up a redirection system before changing the permalink structure of your site.

You can site or blog using a redirection plugin 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 any issues and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up URL redirections using redirection plugins or get professional help)

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

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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