Wouldn’t it be great if after adding a new post to your WordPress site, the following could happen … just from your web address:

• Potential visitors could determine what your content is about,
• Search engines would be able to find your pages faster,
• Every single post you create on your website or blog would have a unique ID, making things easier to manage.

Well, with WordPress 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 posts, categories and other taxonomies (a way to organize things together) like archives.

A permalink is the URL that visitors 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 articles on your site. Some people also refer to permalinks as “pretty” URLs.

Permalinks make the web address pointing to each post on your site permanent, hence a perma-link.

Why Use Permalinks?

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

WordPress is not only great for SEO out of the box, but its SEO aspect can be considerably improved with SEO plugins.

If you are looking to optimize the SEO aspect of your site, then you cannot ignore the importance of your URLs. Search engines like Google tend to give special significance to the URL structure of your site.

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

Now … let’s take a look at why it’s best to use permalinks if publishing content in WordPress.

Normally, a default WordPress installation uses a link-naming structure for your posts that isn’t very search engine friendly and looks like this …

WordPress uses the above link structure with a string query to find information inside its database. It does not mean much to anyone, and it doesn’t help your website with on-site search engine optimization.

As the screenshot taken directly from Google search listings below shows, many site owners haven’t configured their permalinks …

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

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

To something like this …

By default, WordPress post URLs are not very SEO-friendly. In this tutorial, you will learn how to configure your WP permalinks to automatically get better indexing in Google.

Configuring Your WordPress Permalinks

In your WordPress dashboard area 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 “pretty” permalinks instead for our posts. To do this, we will need to specify a different Permalink structure than the default one.

Common Settings – Permalinks

In the Common Settings section, select Custom Structure, then add one or more ‘tags’ (see below) to create search engine-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/cruise-travel/five-favorite-european-cruise-destinations

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=8285

(Using permalinks helps readers and search engines understand what the page is about)

SEO-Friendly Tags

“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, four digits (e.g. ‘2010’)
• %monthnum% – The month the post gets published (e.g. ‘08’)
• %day% – The day the post is published (e.g. ‘27’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘12’)
• %minute% – The minute your post is published (e.g. ‘24’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘11’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘431’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted version of the 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 letters converted to lower case and punctuation marks removed) in the URL. Tip: You can edit the wording in your post titles 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 choosing the ‘Custom Structure’ setting and adding the /%postname%/ tag.

Optional Permalink Settings

If you need to configure 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, using “topics” as your category base will 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 go from this …

To something like this …

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

Remember to save your 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 Notes

Use Short, Descriptive Categories

To get the most SEO 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 and author of the WordPress SEO plugin Joost de Valk, here are a few things to consider if you are wondering whether or not to add categories to your permalink structure:

• If your category is short and descriptive (e.g. uses a relevant keyword or keyword phrase), you may want to add categories to 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 decrease the SEO benefit.
• 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 adding category vs no category there is no ”better” permalink structure to use. Choose the permalink structure that you think will suit your site best. Many SEO experts and webmasters recommend making your web addresses short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We cover WordPress categories in other articles.

Don’t Use Date Permalinks

Another great tip from Joost de Valk is that unless you plan to run a news website or you have any special reason to date your content, it’s best to avoid choosing date-based permalink syntax when configuring your URLs.

(Avoid setting up permalinks that time-stamp your content)

Visitors are less likely to click on a post that is a couple of years old, even if the content is relevant to the answers they are searching for.

What About Changing Permalinks In Blogs With Indexed Posts?

Normally, it’s best to set up your permalinks when you first install WordPress. This should be part of your website planning process.

If your website or blog is already established or your site already has many posts 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 issues and loss of traffic.

Use 301 Redirection

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

Maybe you started out using the default WordPress permalinks and now you want to optimize your site better for search engines. Maybe your site was originally set up to display post dates in your web address and now all of your posts are perceived as being out-of-date and you want to delete the date tags in your URLs.

To edit your permalink structure without negatively impacting your site’s SEO or existing rankings you will need to use ‘301 redirects’ to reassign all links using the previous permalinks structure to links that use the new syntax.

Search engines interpret a code ‘301’ as a link that has permanently moved elsewhere. 301 redirects are the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect visitors to new website destinations and avoid running into page errors when they click on an old link.

To effectively change your syntax and avoid SEO problems, sending visitors to error pages, etc. you should set up your redirection system before changing the permalink structure of your site.

You can add a link redirection system to your do this using a redirection 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 problems and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up 301 redirections using redirection plugins or use the services of a professional)

Congratulations! Now you know about the built-in system WordPress uses to display SEO-friendly URLs for your posts. For additional information on using Permalinks, see the WordPress codex below:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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