Wouldn’t it be great if after publishing content on your WordPress website, the following happened … just from your web address:

• Potential visitors to your site could quickly gain an understanding of what the content is about,
• Search engines could easily find your pages and correctly classify their content for better search rankings,
• Each post published on your site would have its own unique identifier, making things easier to manage.

Well, with permalinks this is really easy to do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – Definition

A permalink is the permanent URL to your individual posts, categories and other taxonomies (a way to group things together) like archives.

A permalink is the web address that others will use to link to posts or sections of your site or the links you send in emails pointing readers to your posts. Some people also call permalinks “pretty” URLs.

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

Permalinks – Why Do You Need To Use Them?

As you have probably heard by now, WordPress is one of the best CMS applications you can use when it comes to SEO.

WordPress is not only well optimized straight out of the box, but there are SEO plugins you can use 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 URLs. Search engines like Google place considerable weight on the URL structure of your site.

Permalinks are used to turn links on your site into memorable 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 why it’s best to configure your permalinks if publishing content in WordPress.

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

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

As the screenshot image below shows, many WordPress users haven’t yet configured their permalinks to publish search optimized content …

Although Google is clearly still indexing the above sites, many site owners are potentially missing out on extra SEO benefits.

To get optimal SEO benefit from using and improve your site’s traffic results, you should configure your permalinks structure to make it more search engine-friendly by displaying relevant keywords in your URL, instead of meaningless characters.

WordPress offers the ability to 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 search engine-friendly. In this step-by-step tutorial, you will learn how to set up the Permalinks section of your WordPress site to help your content rank better in search engines.

Configuring WordPress Permalinks

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

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/how-to-save-money-on-cruise-travel

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=6788

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

WordPress Permalink 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. ‘2014’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘08’)
• %day% – The day your post gets published (e.g. ‘18’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘24’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘55’)
• %second% – The exact second your post is published (e.g. ‘53’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘8958’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted version of the 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 marks deleted) in the URL. Tip: You can always edit the wording in your post title 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.

Optional Permalink Settings

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

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 will 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 change from this …

To this …

If you leave these fields blank the default settings will be used.

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

Use Short, Descriptive Categories

To get the maximum 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 plugin developer Joost de Valk, here are some points to consider if you are wondering whether you should add categories to your permalink structure or not:

• If your domain is short and your category slug is short and descriptive (e.g. uses a relevant keyword or keyword phrase), 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 and decrease the SEO benefit.
• If you plan 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 adding category vs no category there is no perfect permalink structure to use. We recommend choosing the permalink structure you think will suit your site best and that will make your site’s web addresses short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We cover WordPress categories in other articles.

Avoid Setting Up Permalinks That Time-Stamp Your Content

Another great tip from Joost de Valk is that unless you plan to run a news website or you have any special reason to create dated web URLs, it’s best to avoid choosing date-based permalink options when setting up your site’s URLs.

(Avoid setting up URL structures that date your posts)

Visitors 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.

What If My Site Already Has Lots Of Published 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 has been running for a while 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 doing, as making changes to permalinks after your site has been up and running for a while can create issues and errors.

301 Redirects

As you’ve seen in earlier screenshots, some site owners (or their web developers) seem to be unaware of the SEO-friendly URLs feature of WordPress.

Maybe when you started out, your site used the default WordPress permalinks and now you want to improve your SEO. Maybe your website was configured to display post dates in your URLs and now all of your content is showing as being old and you want to delete the date tags of your permalinks.

To edit your permalink structure without affecting your site’s SEO in a negative way you will need to use ‘301 redirections’ to point links that were set up using the old URL structure to links that use the new permalinks structure.

Search engines interpret a ’301′ code as a link that has permanently relocated to another address. 301 redirection is the most efficient and search engine friendly way to redirect users to new site destinations and avoid page errors if following an old link.

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

You can add a link redirection system to your 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 issues and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up a link redirection system using redirection plugins or get professional assistance)

Congratulations! Now you know how to change your blog to display search engine-friendly URLs for your posts. To learn more about using Permalinks, refer to the WordPress codex here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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