Wouldn’t it be great if you could just add a new post to your website, and the following happened … all from your post address:

• New visitors could easily tell what the page was about,
• Google would be able to easily find your pages and correctly index their content for better search results,
• Every post on your website would have its own unique ID, making things easier to manage.

Well, with permalinks you can!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – Definition

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

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

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

Why Use Permalinks?

Hopefully, by now you are probably aware that, WordPress is one of the best CMS applications you can use when it comes to SEO.

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

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

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

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

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

The above link structure is used by WordPress to find data within its database. It doesn’t really help your site with on-site search engine optimization.

As you can see from the image below, many WordPress site owners haven’t yet set up their sites to use permalinks …

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

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

WordPress allows you to create a custom URL structure for your published and archived posts, so your content can go from this …

To something with an SEO-friendly URL like this …

By default, WordPress URLs are not very SEO-friendly. This step-by-step tutorial shows you how to set up your permalinks in WordPress to display your posts with SEO-friendly URLs.

Configuring WordPress Permalinks

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

Common Permalink 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 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/how-to-save-money-on-cruise-travel

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=5783

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

Using Permalink Tags In Custom Structure

“Pretty” URLs, 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. ‘2014’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘01’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘12’)
• %hour% – The hour the post gets published (e.g. ‘16’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘58’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘53’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘858’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of your 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 exclamation symbols deleted) in the URL. Tip: You can always edit the URL wording 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

If you need to set up custom permalinks for your tag and category page URLs here is where you would do this.

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

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

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

So, if you add the following to 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 these fields blank WordPress uses the default settings.

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

Categories

To get the most benefit out of using Permalinks, remember 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 consider if you are wondering whether you should add categories to your permalinks or not:

• If your category name is short and descriptive (e.g. uses a relevant keyword or keyword phrase), 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.
• Do you plan to post content under only one category or multiple categories? 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 using category vs no category there is no ”better” 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 cover WordPress categories in other articles.

Create Timeless Posts

Another tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your goal is to run a news blog or there is a special reason why you need to create dated web addresses, avoid selecting date-based permalink options for your URLs.

(Avoid setting up URL structures that date your content)

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

Changing Your Permalink Structure In Site With Published Content

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 site 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 something that needs to be done, as doing so could create SEO issues and loss of traffic.

Add 301 Redirects

As you’ve seen earlier, many site owners (or whoever set up their site) 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 would like to improve your SEO. Maybe your site was originally set up to display post dates in your URLs and now all of your posts are perceived as being outdated and you want to remove the date portion of your URLs.

The best way to modify your permalinks without negatively affecting your site’s SEO is to add ‘301 redirects’ to point links that use the previous permalinks structure to links that use the new syntax.

A code ‘301’ is interpreted by search engines as a link that has permanently moved elsewhere. 301 redirects are the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect users to new site destinations and avoid running into ”page not found” errors when they click on an old link.

To effectively change your permalink syntax and avoid damaging your rankings, sending visitors to error pages, etc. you will need to add a redirection system before messing with the permalink structure of your site.

You can site or blog using a redirection plugin like Simple 301 Redirects, or Redirection, or get a professional to assist you with setting up and redirecting your permalinks correctly to avoid problems and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up 301 redirects using plugins or get professional assistance)

Congratulations! Now you know how to configure your blog’s permalinks to display search engine-friendly URLs for your posts and improve your search results. For additional information on using Permalinks, see the WordPress codex below:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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