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

• New visitors could quickly gain an understanding of what the post was about,
• Search engines could easily find your posts and correctly classify their content for better search rankings,
• Every single content item published on your website or blog would have its own unique ID, making your site easier to manage.

Well, with permalinks you can!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – What Are They?

Permalinks are the permanent URLs to your individual WordPress posts, categories and other taxonomies (a way to organize things together) like archives.

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

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

Permalinks – Why Do I Need To Use Them?

Hopefully, you probably know by now that, WordPress is one of the best CMS tools available when it comes to publishing search engines optimized content.

WordPress is not only great for SEO out of the box, but the SEO aspect can be easily finetuned using SEO plugins.

If you are looking to optimize the SEO aspect of your site or blog, then you should not ignore the importance of your site’s URLs. Search engines like Google place considerable weight on the structure of URLs when indexing content.

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 see why it’s best to use permalinks when publishing content in WordPress.

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

The above link structure is used by WordPress to locate data within your database. It doesn’t really mean much to anyone, and it doesn’t help your website with on-site SEO.

As you can see from the screenshot image below taken directly from Google search results, many WordPress site owners have not yet configured their sites to use permalinks …

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

To get maximum SEO benefit from using WordPress and improve your site’s traffic results, 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 gives you the ability to create a custom URL structure for your published and archived posts, so your pages can easily go from this …

To this …

By default, WordPress URLs are not very SEO-friendly. This tutorial shows you how to set up the Permalinks section of your WordPress site to display your posts with SEO-friendly URLs.

How To Change WordPress Permalinks

Log into your WordPress dashboard and click on 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 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 …

(Change 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/romantic-cruise-holiday-bargains

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=4876

(Using permalinks helps readers understand what your content is about)

Creating Pretty URL Tags In Custom Structure

“Pretty” URLs, or SEO-friendly URLs, are created by adding one or more ‘tags’ in the Custom Structure field:

• %year% – The year the post gets published, displayed as four digits (e.g. ‘2012’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘06’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘13’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘19’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘29’)
• %second% – The exact second the post gets published (e.g. ‘36’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘2687’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of the post title. For example, if the post title is “Top Five Budget Travel Tips!”, the postname tag will convert this into “top-five-budget-travel-tips” (all letters converted to lower case and removed exclamation symbols) 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 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 ‘Custom Structure’ and using the /%postname%/ tag.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

This section lets you configure custom structures for your tag and category archive page URLs.

This changes 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 “news” as your category base would display your category links as ‘http://domain.com/news/uncategorized/’.

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 this …

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

Remember to save any changes when 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 Notes

Use Descriptive Categories

To get the maximum benefit from 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 and author of the WordPress SEO plugin Joost de Valk, here are some points to keep in mind if you are wondering whether or not to add categories to your permalink structure:

• If your category slug is short and descriptive (e.g. uses a relevant keyword or keyword phrase), 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 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.

Despite being the subject of intense debate in WordPress SEO circles, when it comes to category vs no category there is no ”better” permalink structure to use. Choose the permalink structure that 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 detailed information about WordPress categories in another article.

Make Your Content Timeless

Another useful tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your aim is to run a news website or you have a special reason to create dated web URLs, avoid using date-based permalink syntax for your site’s URLs.

(Avoid using URL structures that time-stamp your content)

People are less likely to click on posts that are several years old, even if the content is relevant to the answers they are searching for.

What If My Blog Already Has Lots Of Published Content?

Normally, your permalinks should be set up when you first install WordPress. This should be part of your site 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 SEO issues and errors.

301 Redirection

As you’ve seen earlier, many website owners (or whoever set up their site) seem to be completely unaware of the SEO-friendly URLs feature of WordPress.

Maybe you started out using the default WordPress permalinks and now you want to optimize your site better for search engines. Perhaps your website was originally set up to display post dates in your URLs and now all of your content is perceived as being outdated and you want to remove the date portion of the URLs.

To modify your URL structure without affecting your site’s SEO in a negative way you should use ‘301 redirects’ to reassign links that were set up using the old permalink structure to URLs using the new permalink syntax.

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

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

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

(Set up URL redirections using redirection plugins or get professional help)

Congratulations! Now you know how to set up your site to display search engine-friendly URLs for your posts. To learn more about using Permalinks, refer to the WordPress codex below:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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