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

• Potential site visitors could quickly gain an understanding of what your content was about,
• Google would be able to discover your posts faster,
• Every item of content published on your site would have a unique identifier, making your site easier to manage.

Well, with permalinks this can easily be done!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – Definition

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 use to link to your articles or sections of your site or the links you send in an email pointing readers to content items on your blog. Permalinks are often called “pretty” URLs.

Permalinks make the URLs to each post on your blog permanent, hence a perma-link.

Why Do You Need To Use Permalinks?

As you have probably heard by now, WordPress is one of the best Content Management Systems available when it comes to publishing search engines optimized content.

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

If you focus on the SEO aspect of your website, then you should not ignore the importance of your site’s URLs. Google tends to pay special attention to the structure of URLs when indexing content.

Permalinks can be used to turn 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 see why you should configure your permalinks in WordPress.

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

WordPress uses the link with a string query shown above to find information within your database. It doesn’t really help your site with on-site search engine optimization.

As the screenshot image below shows, many site owners are still using out of the box settings when publishing content online …

Although Google is clearly still indexing the above sites, the owners of these sites are potentially missing out on additional SEO benefits.

To get the maximum SEO benefit from using WordPress and improve your site’s rankings, 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 lets you create a custom URL structure for your published and archived posts, so your content can go from this …

To something like this …

Out of the box, WordPress URLs are not very SEO-friendly. In this tutorial, you will learn how to set up your permalinks in WordPress to automatically help your content get better indexing results in search engines like Google.

Changing Your WordPress Permalinks

From your WP dashboard menu, 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 “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 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/river-cruises/seven-favorite-european-river-cruises

Instead of this …

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

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

How To Use Permalink 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 of the post, displayed as four digits (e.g. ‘2012’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘08’)
• %day% – The day your post gets published (e.g. ‘04’)
• %hour% – The hour the post is published (e.g. ‘01’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘53’)
• %second% – The exact second the post is published (e.g. ‘22’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘4865’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted version of your 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 letters converted to lower case and punctuation symbols removed) in the URL. Tip: You can edit the words in your post title 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 selecting the ‘Custom Structure’ option and using the /%postname%/ tag.

Optional Permalink Settings

In this section, you can set custom structures for your tag and category URLs.

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

So, if you make the following change in your permalinks Optional > Category base settings section …

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

To something like this …

If you leave the optional settings fields blank the defaults will be used.

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

Categories

To get the maximum SEO 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 a few points to consider if you are wondering whether or not to add categories to your permalinks:

• If your category slug is short and descriptive (e.g. adds a relevant keyword or keyword phrase to your URL), 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 or share and reduce 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 really is no ”better” permalink structure to use. Use the permalink structure that you think will suit your site best. Your post URLs should be short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We cover WordPress categories in other tutorials.

Create Timeless Posts

Another useful tip from Joost de Valk is that unless you run a news blog or there is a special reason why you need to date your content, avoid using date-based permalinks when configuring your blog’s URLs.

(Avoid using permalinks that time-stamp your posts)

Although setting up URL structures that time-stamp your posts may be considered better that using no permalinks at all from an SEO point-of-view, visitors are less likely to click on a post that is a couple of years old, even if the content is relevant to what they are searching for.

Changing Permalinks In Blog With Published Content

Normally, your permalinks should be set up when you install a new WordPress site. This should be part of your website planning process.

If your website is already established 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 really necessary, as making changes to permalinks after your site has already been up and running for a while can create issues and loss of traffic.

301 Redirects

As you’ve seen earlier, some website owners (or their web developers) seem to be completely unaware of the search-friendly URLs feature of WordPress.

Maybe when you started, your site used the default WordPress permalinks and now you want to optimize your site better for search engines. Maybe your website was configured to display post dates in your URLs and now all of your posts are perceived as being outdated and you want to delete the date tags in the permalinks.

The best way to change your URL structure without negatively impacting your site’s SEO is to use ‘301 redirects’ to reassign all links set up using the previous URL structure to web URLs that use the new permalink syntax.

Search engines interpret a code ‘301’ as a link that has permanently moved. 301 redirects are the most efficient and search engine friendly way to redirect users to new web page destinations and avoid ”page not found” errors when they click on an old link.

To create an effective permalink structure change and avoid damaging your search rankings, sending visitors to error pages, etc. you will need to add your redirection system before messing with the permalink structure of your site.

You can add a link redirection system to your 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 redirection plugins 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 search rankings. For additional information on using Permalinks, see the WordPress codex below:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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