Wouldn’t it be great if you could just publish a new page on your website or blog, and the following would then happen … all from your post URL:

• New visitors could easily glean what your content was about,
• Google would easily find your page and correctly index your content to improve your search results,
• Every post added to your website would have a unique identifier, making things easier to manage.

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

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

What’s A Permalink?

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

A permalink is the web address that others use to link to posts or sections of your site or the links you send in emails pointing readers to content items on your website. Permalinks are often called “pretty” URLs.

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

Why Use Permalinks?

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

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

If you are looking to optimize the SEO aspect of your website, then you cannot ignore the importance of its URLs. Search engines like Google tend to pay special attention to the structure of URLs when indexing content.

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

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

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

WordPress uses the link structure shown above to locate information inside your database. It does not help your site with on-site SEO.

As you can see from the image below, many WordPress users have not configured their sites to publish search optimized content …

Although Google is clearly still indexing the above sites, the owners of these sites are missing out on extra SEO benefits.

To get the greatest SEO benefit from using and improve your site’s rankings, you should configure your permalinks structure to make it more SEO-friendly by displaying relevant keywords in your URL, instead of meaningless characters.

WordPress offers the ability to create a custom URL structure for your published and archived posts, so your pages can easily go from this …

To something with an SEO-friendly URL like this …

In this tutorial, you will learn how to configure your WordPress permalinks to display your posts using search engine-friendly URLs instead of the default linking structure and help every new post you add get better indexing results in search engines.

Changing WordPress Permalinks

In your WordPress main menu, select Settings > Permalinks …

This brings 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 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 …

(Configure 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/cruise-deals/top-european-river-cruises

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=8201

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

WordPress Permalink Tags

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

• %year% – The year the post is published, four digits (e.g. ‘2013’)
• %monthnum% – The month your post gets published (e.g. ‘07’)
• %day% – The day the post gets published (e.g. ‘29’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘24’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘02’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘01’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘9347’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted version of the post title. For example, if the post title is ”The Five Don’ts Of DIY Home Repair!”, the postname tag will convert this into “the-five-donts-of-diy-home-repair” (all characters converted to lower case and removed exclamation symbols) in the URL. Tip: You can edit the URL 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 selecting ‘Custom Structure’ and using the /%postname%/ tag.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

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

You can change the ‘base’ tag or category URLs using the following structure:

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

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

So, if you add the following to your permalinks Optional > Category base settings section …

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

To this …

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

Remember to save your changes when 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 – Additional Notes

Use Descriptive Categories

To get greater 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 Joost de Valk, here are some things to keep in mind if you are wondering whether or not to add categories to your permalinks:

• If your category 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 or 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.

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

We provide more information about WordPress categories in another article.

Don’t Use Date Permalinks

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 using date-based permalink syntax for your site’s URLs.

(Avoid using permalinks that date your content)

Although setting up permalinks that time-stamp your posts is better that using no permalinks at all from an SEO perspective, 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.

Changing The Permalink Structure In Blog With Published Posts

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

If your website 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 really necessary, as changing permalinks after your site has already been running for a while can create issues and errors.

301 Redirects

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

Maybe when you started, your site used the default WordPress permalinks and now you want 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 two or three years old and you want to remove the date portion of your permalinks.

The best way to modify your URL structure without negatively impacting your site’s SEO is to use ‘301 redirects’ to reassign links that use the old permalinks structure to web URLs that use the new permalink syntax.

Search engines interpret a ’301′ code as a link that has permanently relocated to another address. 301 redirects are the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect users to new website destinations and avoid ‘404’ (Page not found) errors when they click on an old link.

To create an effective syntax change and avoid damaging your rankings, sending visitors to broken links, etc. you will need to install and set up a 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 use the services of a professional to assist you with setting up and redirecting your permalinks correctly to avoid any issues and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up 301 redirections using a WP plugin or use the services of a professional)

Congratulations! Now you know about the built-in system WordPress uses 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 here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

***