Wouldn’t it be great if after publishing a new page on your website, the following took place … all from your web address:

• Potential visitors could easily gain an understanding of what the content is about,
• Google would be able to find your pages faster,
• Each post on your site would have its own unique identifier, making things 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 an individual WordPress post, category, or other taxonomy (a way to organize things together) like archives.

A permalink is the URL that other people will use to link to articles or sections of your site or the links you send in an email pointing to your posts. Permalinks are also referred to as “pretty” URLs.

Permalinks make the URL pointing to each post on your site permanent, hence a perma-link.

Permalinks – Why Use Them?

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

WordPress is not only great for SEO out of the box, but there are excellent SEO plugins you can install that can help to improve its SEO aspect further.

If you focus on the SEO aspect of your website, then you should not ignore the importance of its site’s URLs. Google places considerable weight on the structure of a site’s URLs when indexing site pages.

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 take a look at why you should use permalinks in WordPress.

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

WordPress uses the link structure with a string query shown above to find data within your database. It does not mean much to anyone, and it doesn’t help your site with on-site search engine optimization.

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

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

To get the most SEO benefit out of 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 numbers and symbols.

WordPress gives you the ability to create a custom URL structure for your published posts, so your content can go from something that is non-SEO friendly like this …

To this …

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

Setting Up WordPress Permalinks

Log into your WordPress dashboard and select Settings > Permalinks …

This will bring 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 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-travel/how-to-save-money-on-cruise-travel

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=7063

(Using permalinks helps readers understand what the page is about)

Pretty URL Tags

“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, four digits (e.g. ‘2011’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘05’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘01’)
• %hour% – The hour the post is published (e.g. ‘08’)
• %minute% – The minute the post gets published (e.g. ‘55’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘23’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘9882’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of the post title. For example, if the 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 characters and no punctuation symbols) 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 the ‘Custom Structure’ option.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

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

This changes the ‘base’ tag or category for your URLs using the following structure:

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

For example, changing your category base to “recipes” would make your category links display as ‘http://domain.com/recipes/category_name/’.

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 the fields blank the default settings will be used.

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 the optimal SEO benefit from 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 and author of the WordPress SEO plugin Joost de Valk, here are a few things to consider if you are wondering whether or not to add categories to your permalink structure:

• If your domain is short and your category name 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 copy or share and reduce the SEO benefit.
• If you plan 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 really is no ideal permalink structure to use. Use the permalink structure that you think will suit your needs best. SEO experts recommend making your web addresses short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We provide more information about WordPress categories in other tutorials.

Create Timeless Posts

Another useful tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your goal is to run a news site or there is a special reason why you need to add dates to your post URLs, it’s best to avoid selecting date-based permalinks when configuring your site’s URLs.

(Avoid using URL structures that time-stamp your content)

People are less likely to click on a post that is a couple of years old, even if the content is relevant to the answers they are searching for.

What If My Blog Already Has Content?

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

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

301 Redirects

As you’ve seen earlier, some website owners (or whoever set up their site) are completely unaware of the SEO-friendly URLs feature of WordPress.

Maybe you started out using the default WordPress URL structure and now you want to improve your site’s SEO. Maybe your website was configured to display post dates in your URLs and now all of your posts are showing as being 2-3 years old and you want to delete the date portion in your permalinks.

The best way to change your permalink structure without affecting your site’s SEO or existing rankings in a negative way is to add ‘301 redirects’ to reassign links using the previous permalinks syntax to links using the new syntax.

A ’301′ code is interpreted by search engines as a link that has permanently moved elsewhere. 301 redirects are the most efficient and search engine friendly way to redirect users to new web page destinations and avoid running into ”page not found” errors when following an old link.

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

You can site using WordPress redirection plugins 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 plugins or get professional help)

Congratulations! Now you know how to set up your WordPress site or blog permalinks to display SEO-friendly URLs for your posts. To learn more about using Permalinks, refer to the official WordPress documentation here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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