Wouldn’t it be great if you could simply add content to your WordPress website or blog, and the following took place … all from your post URL:

• Potential visitors to your site could quickly understand what the content was about,
• Search engines would be able to easily find your post and correctly index its content to improve your search results,
• Every single piece of content published on your website would have its own unique ID, making things easier to manage.

Well, with permalinks you can!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

What Are Permalinks?

Permalinks are the permanent URLs to an individual post, category, or other taxonomy (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 to your posts. Some people also refer to permalinks as “pretty” URLs.

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

Permalinks – Why Use Them?

Hopefully, you probably know by now that, WordPress is one of the best CMS tools available when it comes to publishing search optimized content.

WordPress is not only great for SEO out of the box, but its SEO aspect can be further improved using SEO plugins.

If you focus on the SEO aspect of your site, then you cannot ignore the importance of its URLs. Search engines like Google place considerable weight on 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 usability, aesthetics, and forward-compatibility of your links.

Now … let’s take a look at the reason why you should configure your permalinks in WordPress.

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

The above link structure is used by WordPress to find information within your database. It doesn’t really help your site with on-site search engine optimization.

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

Although Google is still indexing the above sites, they are potentially missing out on extra SEO benefits.

To get the most SEO benefit out of using and improve your site’s rankings, you should set up 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 pages can go from something that is non-SEO friendly like this …

To something like this …

In this tutorial, you will learn how to configure the Permalinks section of your WordPress site to display posts with SEO-friendly URLs instead of the default linking structure and help every new post you add get better indexing in search engines like Google.

Setting Up WordPress Permalinks

Log into your WP admin and select 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 “pretty” permalinks instead for our posts. To do this, we need to specify a different Permalink structure than the one set by default.

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 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/budget-cruises/river-cruise-holiday-deals

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=2849

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

WordPress Permalink Tags

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

• %year% – The year of the post, four digits (e.g. ‘2010’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘08’)
• %day% – The day your post is published (e.g. ‘25’)
• %hour% – The hour the post gets published (e.g. ‘14’)
• %minute% – The minute your post gets published (e.g. ‘13’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘45’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘7311’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of your post title. For example, if your 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 no exclamation symbols) in the URL. Tip: You can edit the URL wording 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’ option.

Optional Permalink Settings

Here you can set custom structures for your tag and category pages.

This changes the ‘base’ tag or category URLs using the following syntax:

• domain.com/category_base/category_name
• domain.com/tag_base/tag_name

For example, using “news” as your category base would make your category links display as ‘http://domain.com/news/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 something like this …

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

Remember to save any changes when finished …

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 – Additional Notes

Categories

To get more SEO benefit out of using Permalinks, remember 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 plugin developer 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 domain is short and your category name 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 share 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 it’s recommended that you do not use 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 really is no ideal permalink structure to use. Choose a permalink structure 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 cover WordPress categories in another tutorial.

Make Your Content Timeless

Another great tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your goal is to run a news blog or you have a special reason to add dates to your URLs, avoid using date-based permalink settings for your site’s URLs.

(Avoid setting up permalinks that date your content)

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

What If My Site Has Indexed Posts?

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

If your website or blog is already established or your site already has a lot of content indexed in the search engines and you would like to change the permalink structure, make sure that this is absolutely something that needs to be done, as changing permalinks after your site has been up and running for a while could create issues and errors.

301 Redirection

As you’ve seen in the above screenshots of actual search results, many WordPress site owners (or whoever set up their site) seem to be completely unaware of the permalinks feature of WordPress.

Maybe when you started out, your site used the default WordPress permalinks and now you would like to optimize your site better for search engines. Maybe your site was configured to display post dates in your web address and now all of your posts are perceived as being out-of-date and you want to delete the date portion in your permalinks.

The best way to modify your permalink structure without negatively affecting your site’s SEO or existing rankings is to add ‘301 redirects’ to reassign links using the old URL syntax to post URLs using the new permalinks syntax.

A code ‘301’ is interpreted by search engines as a link that has been permanently relocated. 301 redirection is the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect visitors to new web page destinations and avoid running into page errors if they click on an old link.

To effectively change your permalink structure and avoid SEO problems, sending visitors to error pages, etc. you will need to install and set up your redirection system before changing the permalink structure of your site.

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

(Set up URL redirections using plugins or get professional assistance)

Congratulations! Now you know how to change your WordPress site 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

***