Wouldn’t it be great if after adding a new page to your WordPress site, the following took place … all from your web address:

• Potential visitors to your site could understand what the content is about,
• Google would be able to find your pages faster,
• Every single piece of content created on your website or blog would have a unique ID, making your content easier to manage.

Well, with permalinks you can!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – What Are They?

A permalink is the permanent URL to an individual post, category, or other taxonomy (a way to group things together) like archives.

A permalink is the web address that people and search engines will use to link to posts or sections of your site or the links you send in an email pointing readers to your posts. Some people also refer to permalinks as “pretty” URLs.

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

Permalinks – Why Use Them?

Hopefully, you are probably aware 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 right out of the box, but there are excellent SEO plugins you can use that will help to finetune its SEO aspect.

If you focus on the SEO aspect of your website, then you should not ignore the importance of its site’s URLs. Google tends to pay special attention to the structure of a site’s URLs when indexing its content.

Permalinks are used to make the 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 review the reason why it’s best to configure your permalinks in WordPress.

Typically, a default 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 data inside your database. It does not mean much to anyone, and it doesn’t help your website with on-site search engine optimization.

As the screenshot image below shows, many site owners haven’t yet configured their sites to use permalinks …

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

To get greater SEO benefit from using WordPress and improve your site’s rankings, 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 gives you the ability to create a custom URL structure for your published posts, so your content can go from this …

To this …

Out of the box, WordPress URLs are not very SEO-friendly. This tutorial shows you how to set up the Permalinks section of your WordPress site to get better indexing results in Google.

How To Configure Your WordPress Permalinks

In your WordPress dashboard 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 search engine friendly URLs instead for our posts. To do this, we will need to specify a different Permalink structure than the default one.

Common Permalink 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/budget-cruises/top-ten-european-river-cruise-destinations

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=1593

(Using post name permalinks helps visitors and search engines understand what your content is about)

Permalink 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, displayed as four digits (e.g. ‘2014’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘06’)
• %day% – The day the post is published (e.g. ‘02’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘03’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘56’)
• %second% – The exact second your post is published (e.g. ‘56’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘577’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of your post title. For example, if the 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 lower case characters and punctuation marks removed) in the URL. Tip: You can edit the URL text in the post slug field on the Add/Edit Post/Page screens.
• %category% – A correctly formatted 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 adding the /%postname%/ tag in ‘Custom Structure’.

Optional Permalink Settings

In this section, you can set up custom structures for your category and tag archive pages.

You can change the ‘base’ tag or category of your URLs using the following syntax:

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

For example, changing your category base to “travel” 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 field …

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

To something like this …

If you leave the fields blank WordPress uses the defaults.

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

Set Up Categories

To get greater benefit from using Permalinks, it’s important 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 a few things to keep in mind if you are wondering whether you should add categories to your permalinks or not:

• 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 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 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 adding category vs no category there really is no perfect permalink structure to use. Choose the permalink structure you think will suit your site best. Your post URLs should be 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 useful tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your site is a news site or you have any special reason to add dates to your post URLs, it’s best to avoid selecting date-based permalink syntax for your site’s URLs.

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

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

What About An Established Blog?

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

If your site has been running for a while 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 something that absolutely needs doing, as doing so could create SEO issues and errors.

301 Redirects

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

Maybe you started out using the default WordPress URL structure and now you want to optimize your site better for search engines. Perhaps your website was configured 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 permalinks.

The best way to edit your permalinks without negatively impacting your site’s SEO or existing rankings is to add ‘301 redirections’ to reassign all links set up using the previous permalinks syntax to web URLs that use the new permalink structure.

Search engines interpret a code ‘301’ as a link that has permanently been moved to another location. 301 redirects are the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect visitors to new website destinations and avoid page errors if clicking on an old link.

To create an effective syntax change and avoid SEO problems, 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 WordPress site or blog using redirection plugins 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 redirects using plugins or get professional assistance)

Congratulations! Now you know how to change your WordPress permalinks to display search engine-friendly URLs for your posts. To learn more about using Permalinks, see the official WordPress documentation below:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

***