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

• Site readers could easily glean what your content is about,
• Google would be able to discover your pages faster,
• Each post published on your website would have a unique ID, making your content easier to manage.

Well, this is what a WordPress permalink lets you do!

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 group things together) like archives.

A permalink is the URL that visitors and search engines will use to link to posts or sections of your site or the links you send in emails pointing to your posts. Permalinks are often called “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?

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

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

If you focus on the SEO aspect of your site or blog, then you cannot ignore the importance of your site’s URLs. Search engines like Google place considerable weight on the structure of your site’s URLs when indexing 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 turn our attention to the reason why it’s best to configure your permalinks in WordPress.

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

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

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

Although these sites are still getting their content indexed on search engines, they are missing out on extra SEO benefits.

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

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

To this …

Out of the box, WordPress URLs are not very search engine-friendly. In this tutorial, you will learn how to set up your permalinks in WordPress to get better indexing in search engines.

Changing Your WordPress Permalinks

Log into your WordPress admin area 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 a “pretty” permalink instead for our posts. To do this, we will need to specify a different Permalink structure than the default one.

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

Instead of this …

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

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

How To Create SEO-Friendly Tags In WordPress

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

• %year% – The year the post gets published, four digits (e.g. ‘2013’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘05’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘26’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘18’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘54’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘17’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘8003’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted version of your post title. For example, if the post title is ”Ten Signs That You’re About To Get Fired From Your Job!”, the postname tag will convert this into “ten-signs-that-youre-about-to-get-fired-from-your-job” (all letters converted to lower case and punctuation marks removed) in the URL. Tip: You can always edit the URL 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 sanitized 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’.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

If you need to configure custom permalinks for your category and tag URLs you can do this in this section.

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, using “topics” as your category base will display your category links as ‘http://domain.com/topics/uncategorized/’.

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

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

To this …

If you leave the optional settings 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

Categories

To get the greatest 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 some things to keep in mind if you are wondering whether you should add categories to your permalinks or not:

• 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 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 using category vs no category there is no ”better” permalink structure to use. Use the permalink structure you think will suit your site best. Many SEO experts recommend making your post URLs short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We cover WordPress categories in other articles.

Create Timeless Posts

Another great tip from Joost de Valk is that unless you plan to run a news blog or there is a special reason why you need to date your content, it’s best to avoid choosing date-based permalink options for your site’s URLs.

(Avoid setting up URL structures that date your posts)

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

Changing The Permalink Structure In Site With Indexed Content

Normally, your site’s permalinks should be configured when you perform a new WordPress installation. This should be part of your site planning process.

If your site is already established or you have a lot of content already indexed in the search engines and you would like to change the permalink structure, make sure that this is something that absolutely needs doing, as doing so can create SEO issues and loss of traffic.

301 Redirects

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

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

The best way to change your permalinks without negatively affecting your site’s SEO or rankings is to add ‘301 redirects’ to reassign all links that were set up using the old permalinks syntax to web URLs using the new permalinks structure.

A code ‘301’ is interpreted by search engines as a link that has permanently moved to another destination. 301 redirects are the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect users to new web page destinations and avoid ‘404’ (Page not found) errors when they click on 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 changing the permalink structure of your site.

You can site or blog using a WP redirection plugin like Simple 301 Redirects, or Redirection, or get a professional to assist you with setting up and redirecting your permalinks correctly to avoid any problems and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up 301 redirects 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. To learn more about using Permalinks, see the WordPress codex here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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