Wouldn’t it be great if after adding a new page to your website, the following happened … all from your post address:

• New visitors could gain an understanding of what your post was about,
• Search engines would be able to easily discover your pages and correctly classify their content to improve your search rankings,
• Every single post published on your site would have its own unique identifier, making your content easier to manage.

Well, with permalinks this is really easy to do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – What Are They?

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 people and search engines use to link to your posts or sections of your site or the links you send in emails pointing readers to a particular post on your website. Some people also call permalinks “pretty” URLs.

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

Why Use Permalinks?

Hopefully, you are probably aware by now that, WordPress is one of the best CMS tools you can use when it comes to publishing search optimized content.

WordPress is not only great for SEO out of the box, but there are SEO plugins you can use that can further help to improve its SEO aspect.

If you focus on the SEO aspect of your site, then you cannot ignore the importance of its site’s URLs. Google places considerable weight on the URL structure of a site.

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

Now … let’s take a look at the reason why it’s best to set up permalinks in WordPress.

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

WordPress uses the above link structure to find data inside your database. It does not mean anything to either visitors or search engines, and it doesn’t help your website with on-site SEO.

As you can see from the screenshot image below, many site owners haven’t configured their sites to use permalinks …

Although these sites are getting their content indexed on search engines, the owners of these sites are potentially missing out on additional SEO benefits.

To get greater SEO benefit out of using and improve your site’s traffic results, you should set up your permalinks structure to make it more search engine-friendly by displaying relevant keywords in your URL, instead of meaningless characters.

WordPress gives you the ability 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 this …

In this step-by-step tutorial, you will learn how to set up the Permalinks section of your WordPress site to display posts with search engine-friendly URLs instead of the default linking structure and help every new post you add get better indexing results in search engines.

Setting Up WordPress Permalinks

Log into your WP dashboard 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 search engine friendly URLs instead for our posts. To do this, we need to specify a different Permalink structure than the default.

Common Settings

In the Common Settings section, select Custom Structure, then add one or more ‘tags’ (see below) to create search engine-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/travel-europe/seven-best-european-river-cruises

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=5429

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

Creating SEO-Friendly 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 the post is published, displayed as four digits (e.g. ‘2012’)
• %monthnum% – The month your post gets published (e.g. ‘05’)
• %day% – The day your post is published (e.g. ‘08’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘18’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘56’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘17’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘2537’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of your 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 removed exclamation mark) in the URL. Tip: You can edit this wording 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 adding the /%postname%/ tag in ‘Custom Structure’.

Optional Permalink Settings

If you need to configure custom permalinks for your tag and category archive page URLs here is where you would do this.

You can change the ‘base’ tag or category 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/category_name/’.

So, if you add the following to your permalinks Optional > Category base settings section …

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

To something like this …

If you leave these fields blank WordPress uses the defaults.

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 – Tips

Use Descriptive Categories

To get maximum SEO benefit out of using Permalinks, you will need 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 a few things to consider if you are wondering whether or not to add categories to your permalinks:

• If your category 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.
• 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 perfect permalink structure to use. Choose a permalink structure you think will suit your site best. Your web address should be short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We provide more information about WordPress categories in other articles.

Make Your Posts Timeless

Another tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your website provides news, or there is a special reason why you need to date your site’s content, it’s best to avoid selecting date-based permalink syntax when configuring your URLs.

(Avoid using URL structures that date your content)

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

What About An Established Blog?

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

If your website has been running for a while or your site already has a lot of 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 making changes to permalinks after your site has already been going for a while can create SEO issues and loss of traffic.

Use 301 Redirection

As you’ve seen earlier, many WordPress users (or whoever set up their site) seem to be completely unaware of the permalinks feature of WordPress.

Maybe when you started out, your site used the default WordPress URL structure and now you want to improve your site’s SEO. Perhaps your site was configured to display post dates in your web address and now all of your posts are perceived as being outdated and you want to remove the date tags in the permalinks.

The best way to edit your permalinks without affecting your site’s SEO or existing rankings in a negative way is to use ‘301 redirections’ to reassign links that were set up using the previous permalink structure to web addresses that use the new permalinks syntax.

A ’301′ code is interpreted by search engines 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 site destinations and avoid running into page errors if they click on an old link.

To create an effective syntax change and avoid SEO problems, sending visitors to broken links, etc. you will need to install and set up your redirection system before messing with the permalink structure of your site.

You can add a link redirection system to your do this using WP plugins 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 link redirections using 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 and improve your search search rankings. For additional information on using Permalinks, refer to the WordPress codex below:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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