Wouldn’t it be great if you could just publish a new post on your site, and the following would then take place … all from your web address:

• Visitors could tell what your page is about,
• Search engines would be able to easily find your pages and correctly index their content for better search results,
• Every single post on your website would have its own unique identifier, making your content easier to manage.

Well, this is what permalinks let you do!

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 URL that others use to link to articles or sections of your site or the links you send in emails pointing readers to a specific item of content on your website. Some people refer to permalinks as “pretty” URLs.

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

Why Do You Need To Use Permalinks?

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

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

If you are looking to optimize the SEO aspect of your site, then you cannot ignore the importance of its site’s URLs. Search engines like Google tend to pay special attention to the structure of URLs when indexing its pages.

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

Now … let’s see why you should set up permalinks if publishing content in WordPress.

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

The above link structure is used by WordPress to locate information within your database. It doesn’t really mean anything to either search engines or visitors, and it doesn’t help your site with on-site SEO.

As the screenshot image taken from Google search results below shows, many WordPress site owners have not yet configured their permalinks to publish search optimized content online …

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

To get the greatest SEO benefit out of using and improve your site’s traffic results, you will want to make sure to configure your permalinks structure to make it more search engine-friendly by displaying relevant keywords in your URL, instead of meaningless characters.

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

To something like this …

In this tutorial, you will learn how to set up your WordPress permalinks to display posts with SEO-friendly URLs instead of the default linking structure and help every new post you add automatically get better indexing in Google.

Changing WordPress Permalinks

In your WordPress admin area 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 search engine friendly URL 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-cruises

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=2867

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

How To Use Permalink Tags In Custom Structure

“Pretty” URLs, or search engine-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. ‘2013’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘01’)
• %day% – The day the post gets published (e.g. ‘04’)
• %hour% – The hour the post gets published (e.g. ‘18’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘21’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘07’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘3891’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of the post title. For example, if the post title is ”The Five Don’ts Of DIY Home Repair!”, the postname tag will convert this into “the-five-donts-of-diy-home-repair” (all lower case characters and removed punctuation symbols) in the URL. Tip: You can always edit the words in your post title 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 choosing the ‘Custom Structure’ option and adding the /%postname%/ tag.

Optional Permalink Settings

In this section, you can configure custom structures for your tag and category archive page URLs.

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

• 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/uncategorized/’.

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

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

To this …

If you leave the optional settings 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 – Tips

Use Descriptive Categories

To get the greatest 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 expert Joost de Valk, here are some points to consider if you are wondering whether or not to add categories to your permalink structure:

• If your domain is short and 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 copy and decrease 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.

Ultimately, when it comes to category vs no category there really is no ideal 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.

Make Your Posts Timeless

Another great tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your aim is to run a news website or blog or there is a special reason why you need to create dated web URLs, it’s best to avoid using date-based permalink settings when setting up your URLs.

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

Visitors 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 Changing Permalinks In Sites With Indexed Content?

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

If your website is already established 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 loss of traffic.

Use 301 Redirects

As you’ve seen in the above screenshots of actual search results, many WordPress users (or whoever set up their site) 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. Maybe your website was configured to display post dates in your URLs and now all of your content is showing as being old and you want to delete the date tags of your URLs.

The best way to change your permalink structure without negatively impacting your site’s SEO or rankings is to use ‘301 redirections’ to point all links that were set up using the old permalink structure to destinations that use the new permalink structure.

A ’301′ code is interpreted by search engines as a link that has permanently moved elsewhere. 301 redirection is the most efficient and search engine friendly way to redirect users to new web page destinations and avoid running into page errors when following an old link.

To effectively change your permalink structure and avoid SEO problems, sending visitors to error pages, etc. you should add your redirection system before messing with the permalink structure of your site.

You can add a link redirection system to your site using a WP redirection plugin like Simple 301 Redirects, or Redirection, or get a professional to help you set up and redirect your permalinks correctly to avoid problems and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up URL redirections 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 official WordPress documentation here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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