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

• Users could quickly tell what your page was about,
• Google could easily find your pages and correctly index their content for better search results,
• Each content item you create on your website would have its own unique ID, making things easier to manage.

Well, this is what permalinks let you do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – Definition

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

A permalink is the URL that other people use to link to posts or sections of your site or the links you send in an email pointing readers to a specific post on your website. Some people also call permalinks “pretty” URLs.

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

Why Do You Need To Use Permalinks?

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

WordPress is not only well optimized right out of the box, but its SEO aspect can be easily finetuned 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 pay special attention to the URL structure of your site.

Permalinks are 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 turn our attention to the reason why it’s best to configure your permalinks if publishing content 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 locate information inside your database. It does not help your site with on-site search engine optimization.

As the screenshot image taken from Google search listings below shows, many WordPress users have not yet configured their sites to use WordPress permalinks …

Although Google is still indexing the above sites, many site owners are potentially missing out on additional SEO benefits.

To get maximum SEO benefit from using WordPress and improve your site’s rankings, you will want to make sure to 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 like this …

Out of the box, WordPress post URLs are not very search engine-friendly. In this step-by-step tutorial, you will learn how to set up the Permalinks section of your WordPress site to help your content rank better in search engines.

Changing Your WordPress Permalinks

Log into your WP administration section and click on Settings > Permalinks …

This brings 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 a “pretty” permalink 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 search engine-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/europe-travel/how-to-save-money-on-cruise-travel

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=4082

(Using permalinks helps search engines and visitors understand what the content is about)

Permalink Tags

“Pretty” permalinks, or SEO-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. ‘2010’)
• %monthnum% – The month the post gets published (e.g. ‘01’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘01’)
• %hour% – The hour your post is published (e.g. ‘20’)
• %minute% – The minute the post is published (e.g. ‘51’)
• %second% – The exact second the post gets published (e.g. ‘10’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘7815’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of the post title. For example, if your post title is “Top Five Budget Travel Tips!”, the postname tag will convert this into “top-five-budget-travel-tips” (all characters converted to lower case and punctuation symbol removed) in the URL. Tip: You can always edit this 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 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 selecting the ‘Custom Structure’ option and using the /%postname%/ tag.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

This section lets you set up custom structures for your tag and category URLs.

This changes the ‘base’ tag or category URLs using the following syntax:

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

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

So, if you enter the following in your permalinks Optional > Category base settings section …

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

To something like this …

If you leave these fields blank the defaults will be used.

Remember to save any changes when 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 – Tips

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, WordPress will use the default category (uncategorized).

According to WordPress SEO expert Joost de Valk, here are some points to keep in mind if you are wondering whether or not to add categories to your permalinks:

• If your category slug is short and descriptive (e.g. adds a relevant keyword or keyword phrase to your URL), you may want to add the category tag 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 reduce the SEO benefit.
• 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 using category vs no category there is no perfect permalink structure to use. We recommend choosing the permalink structure you think will suit your needs best and that will make your web address short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We provide detailed information about WordPress categories in other tutorials.

Don’t Use Date Permalinks

Another great tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your goal is to run a news website or there is a special reason why you need to add dates to your post URLs, it’s best to avoid using date-based permalink settings for your blog’s URLs.

(Avoid using permalinks that time-stamp your posts)

Although setting up permalinks that date your posts may be considered better that using no permalinks at all from an SEO aspect, visitors are less likely to click on a post that is several years old, even if the content is relevant to what they are searching for.

What If My Site Has Lots Of Published Content?

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

If your website or blog 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.

301 Redirection

As you’ve seen earlier, some WordPress site owners (or whoever set up their site) are completely unaware of the search-friendly URLs feature of WordPress.

Maybe you started out using the default WordPress URL structure and now you would like 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 out-of-date and you want to remove the date tags in the permalinks.

To modify your URL structure without negatively affecting your site’s SEO or rankings you should add ‘301 redirections’ to reassign links using the old URL syntax to web addresses that use the new syntax.

Search engines interpret a code ‘301’ as a link that has permanently relocated to another address. 301 redirection is the most efficient and search engine friendly way to redirect visitors to new website destinations and avoid ‘404’ (Page not found) errors if they click on an old link.

To effectively change your syntax and avoid SEO problems, sending visitors to broken links, etc. you should configure a redirection system before changing the permalink structure of your site.

You can add a link redirection system to your do this using a WordPress redirection plugin like Simple 301 Redirects, or Redirection, or use the services of a professional to help you set up and redirect your permalinks correctly to avoid issues and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up 301 redirects using a WordPress plugin 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 here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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