Wouldn’t it be great if after adding new content to your WordPress website, the following took place … just from your page URL:

• Visitors could easily understand what the content is about,
• Search engines would easily discover your pages and correctly classify their content to improve your search results,
• Every item of content you create on your website or blog would have a unique ID, making your site easier to manage.

Well, with permalinks you can easily do this!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – Definition

A permalink is the permanent URL to an individual post, category, or other taxonomy (a way to organize things together) like archives.

A permalink is the URL that people and search engines will use to link to your articles or sections of your site or the links you send in emails pointing to content items on your website. Permalinks are often referred to as “pretty” URLs.

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

Permalinks – Why Do You Need To Use Them?

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

WordPress is not only well optimized right out of the box, but there are SEO plugins you can install that can further help to finetune its SEO aspect.

If you are looking to optimize the SEO aspect of your site, then you cannot ignore the importance of your site’s URLs. Google places considerable weight on the structure of URLs when indexing site pages.

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

Now … let’s see why it’s best to set up permalinks in WordPress.

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

WordPress uses the above link structure to locate information inside your database. It does not help your site with on-site SEO.

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

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

To get greater SEO benefit from using WordPress 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 offers you the ability to create a custom URL structure for your published and archived posts, so your content can easily go from something that is non-SEO friendly like this …

To something with an SEO-friendly URL like this …

By default, WordPress post URLs are not very search engine-friendly. This step-by-step tutorial shows you how to configure your WordPress permalinks to help your content rank better in Google.

Setting Up Your WordPress Permalinks

Log into your WP dashboard section and click on 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 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 …

(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/europe-cruises/top-ten-european-river-cruise-destinations

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=1864

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

How To Add Search Engine-Friendly Tags In WordPress

“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, displayed as four digits (e.g. ‘2011’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘11’)
• %day% – The day your post is published (e.g. ‘04’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘11’)
• %minute% – The minute the post gets published (e.g. ‘19’)
• %second% – The exact second the post gets published (e.g. ‘32’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘3487’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of the 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 lower case characters and removed exclamation symbols) in the URL. Tip: You can 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 choosing the ‘Custom Structure’ setting and adding the /%postname%/ tag.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

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

This changes the ‘base’ category or tag of your 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/category_name/’.

So, if you make the following change 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 WordPress uses the default settings.

Remember to save your 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 Categories

To get the best possible 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 and author of the WordPress SEO plugin Joost de Valk, here are some points to keep in mind if you are wondering whether you should add categories to your permalinks or not:

• 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 use the category tag 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 copy and decrease the SEO benefit.
• If you plan 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 ideal permalink structure to use. Use a permalink structure that you think will suit your site best. Many SEO experts and webmasters recommend making your post URLs short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We provide more information about WordPress categories in another article.

Avoid Time-Stamping URLs

Another useful 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 using date-based permalink settings when setting up your URLs.

(Avoid using permalinks that time-stamp your posts)

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 Established Blogs?

Normally, it’s best to configure your permalinks when you first install WordPress. This should be part of your website planning process.

If your site 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 really something that needs to be done, as making changes to permalinks after your site has been up and running for a while could create issues and errors.

301 Redirection

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

Maybe when you started, your site used the default WordPress URL structure and now you want to optimize your site better for search engines. Maybe your site was originally set up to display post dates in your URLs and now all of your content is showing as being old and you want to remove the date portion in the permalinks.

The best way to modify your permalinks without impacting your site’s SEO or existing rankings in a negative way is to use ‘301 redirections’ to point links set up using the old permalink structure to web URLs using the new structure.

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

To effectively change your syntax and avoid damaging your search rankings, sending visitors to broken links, etc. you should set up your redirection system before messing with the permalink structure of your site.

You can site or blog using a redirection plugin like Simple 301 Redirects, or Redirection, or use the services of a professional to help you set up and redirect your permalinks correctly to avoid any issues and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up 301 redirections using a WordPress plugin or use the services of a professional)

Congratulations! Now you know how to set up your blog to display search engine-friendly URLs for your posts and improve your search results. To learn more about using Permalinks, refer to the official WordPress documentation here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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