Wouldn’t it be great if you could add a new page to your WordPress website, and the following happened … just from your post URL:

• New visitors could easily tell what the page is about,
• Google could easily discover your post and correctly index your content for better search results,
• Every content item on your site would have a unique identifier, making things easier to manage.

Well, this is what permalinks let you do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

What Are Permalinks?

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 web address that others will use to link to your articles or sections of your site or the links you send in an email pointing readers to your posts. Some people refer to permalinks as “pretty” URLs.

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

Permalinks – Why Do I Need To Use Them?

Hopefully, you are probably aware by now that, WordPress is one of the best CMS tools available when it comes to SEO.

WordPress is not only well optimized right out of the box, but the SEO aspect can be easily improved with excellent SEO plugins.

If you are looking to optimize the SEO aspect of your site, then you should not ignore the importance of its site’s URLs. Search engines like Google tend to give special significance to the URL structure of a site.

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

Now … let’s turn our attention to why it’s best to set up 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 above link structure to locate data inside your database. It doesn’t really mean much to anyone, and it doesn’t help your website with on-site search engine optimization.

As you can see from the image below, many WordPress users haven’t yet configured their permalinks …

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

To get the most SEO benefit from using WordPress and improve your site’s traffic results, you will want to make sure to 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 and archived posts, so your content can go from something that is non-SEO friendly like this …

To something like this …

By default, WordPress URLs are not very SEO-friendly. This tutorial explains how to configure your permalinks in WordPress to help your content rank better in Google.

Configuring Your WordPress Permalinks

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

Common Settings

In the Common Settings section, select Custom Structure, then add one or more ‘tags’ (see below) to create SEO-friendly URLs …

(Configure 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/top-ten-european-river-cruise-destinations

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=3727

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

How To Create Pretty WordPress URLs

“Pretty” permalinks, 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. ‘2014’)
• %monthnum% – The month the post is published (e.g. ‘08’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘25’)
• %hour% – The hour your post is published (e.g. ‘14’)
• %minute% – The minute the post gets published (e.g. ‘02’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘39’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘1846’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of the post title. For example, if your 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 letters and removed punctuation marks) in the URL. Tip: You can edit the words in your post titles 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 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 the ‘Custom Structure’ setting.

Optional Permalink Settings

If you need to set up custom structures for your tag and category URLs here is where you would do this.

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

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

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

To this …

If you leave the fields blank WordPress uses the default settings.

Remember to save any changes when 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

Set Up Your Categories

To get more 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 some points to consider if you are wondering whether you should add categories to your permalink structure 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 share or copy and reduce the SEO benefit.
• 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 using category vs no category there really is no perfect 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 articles.

Make Your Content Timeless

Another tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your website provides news or time-specific information, or you have any special reason to create dated post addresses, it’s best to avoid choosing date-based permalink syntax for your blog’s URLs.

(Avoid using permalinks that date your posts)

Although using permalinks that date your posts may be considered better that using no permalinks at all from an SEO aspect, people 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 If My Site Has Lots Of Content?

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

If your site has been running for a while 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.

Add 301 Redirection

As you’ve seen earlier, some 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 optimize your site better for search engines. Maybe your website or blog was configured to display post dates in your URLs and now all of your content is showing as being two or three years old and you want to delete the date tags of your URLs.

To modify your permalinks without negatively impacting your site’s SEO or rankings you will need to use ‘301 redirections’ to point all links that were set up using the previous permalink structure to destinations that use the new structure.

Search engines interpret a ’301′ code as a link that has permanently been relocated to another destination. 301 redirects are the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect visitors to new site destinations and avoid running into page errors when following an old link.

To effectively change your syntax and avoid damaging your search rankings, sending visitors to error pages, etc. you will need to configure a redirection system before messing with the permalink structure of your site.

You can WP site or blog using plugins 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 301 redirects using plugins or use the services of a professional)

Congratulations! Now you know how to set up your blog’s permalinks to display SEO-friendly URLs for your posts and improve your search search rankings. To learn more about using Permalinks, refer to the WordPress codex below:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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