Wouldn’t it be great if after adding a new post to your website, the following took place … all from your post URL:

• Site readers could glean what the page was about,
• Search engines would find your posts faster,
• Every content item created on your site would have its own unique identifier, making things easier to manage.

Well, with WordPress permalinks this is really easy to do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalink – What Is It?

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 people and search engines use to link to your posts or sections of your site or the links you send in an email pointing readers to content items on your website. Some people also refer to permalinks as “pretty” URLs.

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

Permalinks – Why Use Them?

As you are probably aware, 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 there are excellent SEO plugins you can install that will help to improve its SEO aspect.

If you focus on the SEO aspect of your site, then you cannot ignore the importance of its URLs. Search engines like Google tend to pay special attention to the URL structure of your site.

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

Now … let’s turn our attention to why it’s best to configure your permalinks when publishing content in WordPress.

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

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

As the screenshot below shows, many site owners are still using out of the box permalink settings when publishing their content online …

Although Google is still indexing the above sites, the owners of these sites are potentially missing out on extra SEO benefits.

To get the greatest SEO benefit out of using WordPress and improve your site’s rankings, you should configure your permalinks structure to make it more SEO-friendly by displaying relevant keywords in your URL, instead of meaningless characters.

WordPress allows you to create a custom URL structure for your published posts, so your pages can go from something that is non-SEO friendly like this …

To something like this …

By default, WordPress URLs are not very SEO-friendly. In this tutorial, you will learn how to set up the Permalinks section of your WordPress site to help your content rank better in Google.

Configuring WordPress Permalinks

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

Permalinks > Common 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/cruise-travel/river-cruise-holiday-bargains

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=7815

(Using post name permalinks helps readers understand what the page is about)

Creating Pretty URL Tags In Custom Structure

“Pretty” permalinks, 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. ‘2010’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘01’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘16’)
• %hour% – The hour your post gets published (e.g. ‘21’)
• %minute% – The minute your post is published (e.g. ‘50’)
• %second% – The exact second your post is published (e.g. ‘05’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘3973’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted version of your post title. For example, if your post title is ”It Ain’t Worth Doin’ No More!”, the postname tag will convert this into “it-aint-worth-doin-no-more” (all letters 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 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 ‘Custom Structure’ and using the /%postname%/ tag.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

If you need to set up custom structures for your tag and category archive page URLs you can do this in this section.

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 “recipes” will display your category links as ‘http://domain.com/recipes/uncategorized/’.

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

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

To this …

If you leave the optional settings fields blank the defaults will be used.

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 – Additional Info

Use Short, Descriptive Categories

To get greater benefit from using Permalinks, you will need 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 expert 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 slug 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 copy and reduce the SEO benefit.
• Do you plan to post content under only one category or multiple categories? If you plan 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 really is no perfect permalink structure to use. Choose a 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.

Avoid Setting Up Permalinks That Time-Stamp Your Content

Another great tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your aim is to run a news website or you have any special reason to create dated website URLs, avoid choosing date-based permalink settings when setting up your blog’s URLs.

(Avoid using URL structures that date your posts)

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

What About Changing Permalinks In Established Sites?

Normally, your permalinks should be configured when you first install WordPress. This should be part of your site planning process.

If your site is already established or your site already has a lot of posts indexed in the search engines and you would like to change the permalink structure, make sure that this is absolutely something that needs to be done, as changing permalinks after your site has been going for a while can create issues and errors.

301 Redirection

As you’ve seen in the above screenshots of actual search results, some site owners (or their web developers) are completely unaware of the search-friendly URLs feature of WordPress.

Maybe when you started out, your site used the default WordPress URL structure and now you would like to improve your site’s SEO. Perhaps your website was configured 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 of the permalinks.

The best way to change your permalink structure without affecting your site’s SEO in a negative way is to add ‘301 redirections’ to reassign all links that use the old URL syntax to URLs using the new permalink syntax.

A code ‘301’ is interpreted by search engines as a link that has permanently been moved. 301 redirection is the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect users to new site destinations and avoid page errors if clicking on an old link.

To create an effective permalink structure change and avoid damaging your search rankings, sending visitors to broken links, etc. you will need to set up a redirection system before messing with the permalink structure of your site.

You can site using a 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 any problems and troubleshoot any errors.

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

Congratulations! Now you know about the built-in system WordPress uses to display SEO-friendly URLs for your posts. To learn more about using Permalinks, see the official WordPress documentation below:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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