Wouldn’t it be great if after adding a new page to your WordPress website or blog, the following happened … all from your post address:

• Users could glean what your content was about,
• Search engines could discover your posts faster,
• Every item of content published on your website or blog would have a unique identifier, making your site easier to manage.

Well, with WordPress permalinks you can easily do this!

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 people and search engines will use to link to posts or sections of your site or the links you send in an email pointing readers to content items on your blog. Permalinks are sometimes referred to as “pretty” URLs.

Permalinks make the web address pointing to each post on your website permanent, hence a perma-link.

Permalinks – Why 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 great for SEO out of the box, but there are SEO plugins you can use that will help to fine tuned its SEO aspect further.

If you are looking to optimize the SEO aspect of your site, then you cannot ignore the importance of your site’s URLs. Search engines like Google place considerable weight on the URL structure of a site.

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

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

WordPress uses the above link with a string query to locate information within your database. It does not mean anything to either visitors or search engines, and it doesn’t help your website with on-site search engine optimization.

As you can see from the screenshot below taken from Google search listings, many WordPress site owners are still using out-of-the-box settings when publishing content online …

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

To get the greatest SEO benefit out of using WordPress and improve your site’s traffic results, you should configure your permalinks structure to make it more SEO-friendly by displaying relevant keywords in your URL, instead of meaningless numbers and symbols.

WordPress lets you 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 this …

By default, WordPress post URLs are not very SEO-friendly. In this tutorial, you will learn how to set up your permalinks in WordPress to display your posts with SEO-friendly URLs.

Changing Your WordPress Permalinks

From your WP admin menu, select Settings > Permalinks …

This brings up 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 search engine friendly URLs instead for our posts. To do this, we need to specify a different Permalink structure than the one set by default.

Common Permalink Settings

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

(Set up 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/budget-cruises/romantic-cruise-holiday-bargains

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=2856

(Using post name permalinks helps search engines and readers understand what your page is about)

SEO-Friendly Tags

“Pretty” URLs, or search engine-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. ‘2011’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘01’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘17’)
• %hour% – The hour the post gets published (e.g. ‘10’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘58’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘20’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘5097’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of your post title. For example, if the post title is ”Ten Best Hotels In Cote D’Azur!”, the postname tag will convert this into “ten-best-hotels-in-cote-dazur” (all characters converted to lower case and exclamation symbols deleted) in the URL. Tip: You can always edit the wording in your post titles 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 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 adding the /%postname%/ tag in ‘Custom Structure’.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

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

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 “travel” as your category base would display your category links as ‘http://domain.com/travel/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 these fields blank WordPress uses the default settings.

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 more benefit from using Permalinks, it’s important 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 plugin developer Joost de Valk, here are some things to keep in mind if you are wondering whether or not to add categories to your permalink structure:

• If your domain is short and your category is short and descriptive (e.g. adds a relevant keyword or keyword phrase to your URL), you may want to add categories 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 copy 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.

Ultimately, when it comes to adding category vs no category there is no ideal permalink structure to use. Use the permalink structure you think will suit your needs best. SEO experts recommend making your post URLs short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We provide detailed information about WordPress categories in other articles.

Avoid Using Time-Specific Permalinks

Another useful tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your goal is to run a news website or there is a special reason why you need to create dated web addresses, it’s best to avoid using date-based permalink options when setting up your site’s URLs.

(Avoid using permalinks that date your posts)

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.

Changing The Permalink Structure In Site With Published Posts

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

If your website 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 absolutely something that needs to be done, as changing permalinks after your site has already been running for a while can create issues and errors.

301 Redirection

As you’ve seen in earlier screenshots, many WordPress users (or their web developers) are unaware of the permalinks feature of WordPress.

Maybe you started out using the default WordPress URL structure and now you want to improve your SEO. Perhaps your website or blog was configured to display post dates in your web address and now all of your content is showing as being 2-3 years old and you want to delete the date tags of your URLs.

The best way to modify your permalink structure without negatively affecting your site’s SEO is to use ‘301 redirects’ to point all links that use the previous permalinks syntax to URLs using the new structure.

A code ‘301’ is interpreted by search engines as a link that has permanently relocated to another address. 301 redirection is the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect users to new site destinations and avoid running into page errors when clicking on an old link.

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

You can WordPress site using a plugin like Simple 301 Redirects, or Redirection, or get a professional to help you set up and redirect your permalinks correctly to avoid any problems and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up 301 redirections using plugins or get professional help)

Congratulations! Now you know how to set up your WordPress site or blog’s permalinks to display search engine-friendly URLs for your posts. For additional information on using Permalinks, refer to the WordPress codex here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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