Wouldn’t it be great if you could publish a new post on your site, and the following happened … all from your post address:

• Site readers could easily understand what the page was about,
• Search engines would be able to easily discover your post and correctly index the content for better search results,
• Every post on your site would have a unique identifier, making things easier to manage.

Well, this is what a WordPress permalink lets you do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – Definition

Permalinks are the permanent URLs to your individual posts, categories and other taxonomies (a way to group things together) like archives.

A permalink is the web address that people and search engines will use to link to your posts or sections of your site or the links you send in an email pointing to posts on your site. Some people refer to permalinks as “pretty” URLs.

Permalinks make the web address pointing to each post on your site 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 CMS tools available when it comes to publishing search optimized content.

WordPress is not only great for SEO out of the box, but there are SEO plugins you can use that will help to enhance its SEO aspect.

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

Permalinks can be used to turn links on your site into memorable and more “search engine friendly” URLs. Permalinks 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 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 link structure shown above to locate data inside its database. It doesn’t really 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 users haven’t configured their permalinks …

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

To get greater SEO benefit out of using and improve your site’s traffic results, you will want to make sure to set up your permalinks structure to make it more SEO-friendly by displaying relevant keywords in your URL, instead of meaningless characters.

WordPress lets you create a custom URL structure for your published posts, so your pages can go from this …

To something like this …

Out of the box, WordPress post URLs are not very SEO-friendly. In this step-by-step tutorial, you will learn how to configure your permalinks in WordPress to automatically help you get better indexing in Google.

Setting Up Your WordPress Permalinks

In your WordPress dashboard select, Settings > Permalinks …

This brings 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 will need to specify a different Permalink structure than the default one.

Common Settings – Permalinks

In the Common Settings section, select Custom Structure, then add one or more ‘tags’ (see below) to create SEO-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/travel-tips/cruise-holiday-bargains

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=4927

(Using permalinks helps search engines and readers understand what your content 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, displayed as four digits (e.g. ‘2011’)
• %monthnum% – The month the post is published (e.g. ‘03’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘21’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘14’)
• %minute% – The minute your post is published (e.g. ‘34’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘11’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘417’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of your post title. For example, if the post title is ”It Ain’t Worth Doin’ No More!”, the postname tag will convert this into “it-aint-worth-doin-no-more” (all letters converted to lower case and punctuation symbols deleted) in the URL. Tip: You can edit the URL text 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’ setting and adding the /%postname%/ tag.

Optional Permalink Settings

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

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 “topics” 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 go from this …

To this …

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

Remember to save your 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 Information

Set Up Categories

To get the best 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 Joost de Valk, here are some points to keep in mind if you are wondering whether or not to add categories to your permalinks:

• If your category slug 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 decrease 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 we recommend not using the category tag in your permalink structure.

Ultimately, when it comes to using category vs no category there is no perfect permalink structure to use. Choose the permalink structure you think will suit your needs best. Many SEO experts and webmasters recommend making your web addresses short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We cover WordPress categories in other articles.

Create Timeless Posts

Another useful tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your site is a news blog or there is a special reason why you need to create dated web addresses, it’s best to avoid choosing date-based permalink settings when configuring your URLs.

(Avoid using permalinks that time-stamp your posts)

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

Changing Your Permalink Structure In An Established Site

Normally, your site’s permalinks should be set up when you perform a new WordPress installation. 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 want to change the permalink structure, make sure that this is something that absolutely needs doing, as changing permalinks after your site has already been going for a while can create issues and errors.

Use 301 Redirects

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

Maybe you started out using the default WordPress URL structure and now you would like to improve your SEO. Perhaps your website or blog was configured to display post dates in your URLs and now all of your posts are showing as being old and you want to remove the date portion of the permalinks.

To modify your permalinks without negatively affecting your site’s SEO or rankings you should use ‘301 redirects’ to reassign all links that were set up using the previous URL syntax to web addresses that use the new permalinks syntax.

Search engines interpret a ’301′ code as a link that has been permanently moved. 301 redirection is the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect visitors to new web page destinations and avoid ”page not found” errors when following an old link.

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

You can add a link redirection system to your do this using plugins like Simple 301 Redirects, or Redirection, or get a professional to assist you with setting up and redirecting your permalinks correctly to avoid any problems 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 configure your WordPress permalinks to display search engine-friendly URLs for your posts. To learn more about using Permalinks, see the official WordPress documentation here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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