Wouldn’t it be great if after publishing new content on your WordPress website or blog, the following happened … just from your post URL:

• Visitors could quickly glean what your post is about,
• Google would discover your posts faster,
• Every post you create on your website would have a unique ID, making your site easier to manage.

Well, with permalinks you can easily do this!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – Definition

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

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

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

Permalinks – Why Use Them?

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

WordPress is not only well optimized straight out of the box, but the SEO aspect can be considerably improved with SEO plugins.

If you are looking to optimize the SEO aspect of your website, then you cannot ignore the importance of your URLs. Search engines like Google place considerable weight on the URL structure of a site.

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

Now … let’s see why it’s best to use 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 above link structure with a string query to locate information within your database. It does not mean anything to search engines or visitors, and it doesn’t help your site with on-site SEO.

As you can see from the screenshot below, many site owners are still using out-of-the-box settings when publishing content online …

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

To get the most 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 search engine-friendly by displaying relevant keywords in your URL, instead of meaningless numbers and symbols.

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

To this …

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

Configuring Your WordPress Permalinks

In your WordPress dashboard 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 Settings – Permalinks

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/river-cruises/how-to-save-money-on-cruise-travel

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=9084

(Using permalinks helps readers understand what the content is about)

Creating Pretty WordPress URLs

“Pretty” permalinks, 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. ‘2010’)
• %monthnum% – The month your post is published (e.g. ‘12’)
• %day% – The day your post gets published (e.g. ‘19’)
• %hour% – The hour your post gets published (e.g. ‘22’)
• %minute% – The minute your post gets published (e.g. ‘59’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘35’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘2916’)
• %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 lower case letters and no exclamation symbols) in the URL. Tip: You can always edit the wording in your post titles 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 the ‘Custom Structure’ setting.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

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

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 “topics” as your category base would display your category links as ‘http://domain.com/topics/uncategorized/’.

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

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

To something like this …

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

Remember to save any changes after you are 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 – Additional Information

Use Short, Descriptive Categories

To get the maximum SEO benefit out of using Permalinks, remember 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 a few things to keep in mind if you are wondering whether you should add categories to your permalinks or not:

• If your domain is short and your category name 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 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.

Ultimately, when it comes to using category vs no category there is no ideal permalink structure to use. We recommend choosing the permalink structure you think will suit your site best and that will make your post URLs short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We provide more information about WordPress categories in another article.

Create Timeless Posts

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

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

People 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 Permalinks In Blog With Indexed Content

Normally, your site’s permalinks should be configured when you install a new WordPress site. This should be part of your site 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 absolutely necessary, as doing so can create issues and errors.

Add 301 Redirects

As you’ve seen earlier, some WordPress users (or whoever set up their site) are completely unaware of the permalinks 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 content is perceived as being outdated and you want to delete the date tags of the URLs.

To modify your permalink structure without negatively impacting your site’s SEO or rankings you will need to add ‘301 redirections’ to reassign all links that use the old URL structure to post URLs that use the new syntax.

A code ‘301’ is interpreted by search engines as a link that has permanently moved to another destination. 301 redirects are the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect visitors to new web page destinations and avoid running into page errors if following an old link.

To create an effective syntax change and avoid damaging your search rankings, sending visitors to error pages, etc. you will need to 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 get a professional to assist you with setting up and redirecting your permalinks correctly to avoid problems and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up URL redirections using plugins or use the services of a professional)

Congratulations! Now you know how to change your WordPress permalinks to display SEO-friendly URLs for your posts. To learn more about using Permalinks, refer to the WordPress codex below:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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