Wouldn’t it be great if after publishing a new page on your site, the following took place … all from your post URL:

• Site visitors could determine what your post is about,
• Google would discover your posts faster,
• Every post on your website or blog would have its own unique ID, making your site easier to manage.

Well, this is what WordPress permalinks let you do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

What’s A Permalink?

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 other people will use to link to articles or sections of your site or the links you send in an email pointing readers to posts on your site. Some people also call permalinks “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 Content Management Systems you can use when it comes to SEO.

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

If you are looking to optimize the SEO aspect of your website, then you should not ignore the importance of its site’s URLs. Google tends to give special significance to the URL structure of a site.

Permalinks can be used to make the links on your site into “search engine friendly” URLs. Permalinks also improve the aesthetics, usability, and forward-compatibility of your links.

Now … let’s review the reason why you should configure your permalinks in WordPress.

Typically, 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 to find information inside its 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 directly from Google search results, many site owners haven’t yet configured their sites to use permalinks …

Although these sites are getting their content indexed on search engines, many site owners are potentially missing out on extra SEO benefits.

To get greater SEO benefit out of using WordPress 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 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 something with an SEO-friendly URL like this …

By default, WordPress URLs are not very SEO-friendly. This step-by-step tutorial shows you how to set up your permalinks in WordPress to display posts using search engine-friendly URLs.

How To Configure WordPress Permalinks

Log into your WordPress dashboard 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 a search engine friendly URL instead for our posts. To do this, we 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 …

(Change 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-deals/how-to-save-money-on-cruise-travel

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=8678

(Using post name permalinks helps search engines and visitors understand what the content is about)

How To Create Permalink Tags In WordPress

“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. ‘2013’)
• %monthnum% – The month the post gets published (e.g. ‘05’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘14’)
• %hour% – The hour the post is published (e.g. ‘08’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘24’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘38’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘2318’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted version of the post title. For example, if the 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 letters and punctuation symbols removed) 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 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 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

If you need to configure custom structures for your category and tag page URLs here is where you would do this.

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

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

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

So, if you enter the following in your permalinks Optional > Category base settings section …

Your ‘category archives’ page URL will change from this …

To something like this …

If you leave these fields blank the default settings 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

Use Short, Descriptive Categories

To get the most benefit from 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 expert and author of the WordPress SEO plugin Joost de Valk, here are a few things to keep in mind if you are wondering whether you should add categories to your permalinks or not:

• If your category slug is short and descriptive (e.g. adds a relevant keyword or keyword phrase to your URL), 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 copy 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 category vs no category there really is no ”better” permalink structure to use. Choose the permalink structure you think will suit your needs best. Many SEO experts recommend making your post URLs short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We provide more information about WordPress categories in other tutorials.

Make Your Posts Timeless

Another useful tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your website provides news, or you have any special reason to create dated post addresses, avoid using date-based permalink syntax when setting up your URLs.

(Avoid setting up permalinks that time-stamp your content)

Although setting up URL structures that date your content is better that using no permalinks at all from an SEO point-of-view, people are less likely to click on a post if it is a couple of years old, even if the content is relevant to the answers they are searching for.

What About Sites With Indexed Content?

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

If your website or blog 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 something that absolutely needs doing, as changing permalinks after your site has already been going for a while could create SEO issues and errors.

Add 301 Redirects

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

Maybe you started out using the default WordPress permalinks and now you want to improve your site’s SEO. Maybe your site was originally set up 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 remove the date tags of the URLs.

To edit your permalink structure without impacting your site’s SEO in a negative way you should use ‘301 redirects’ to point links set up using the previous permalinks syntax to destinations using the new permalink structure.

A ’301′ code 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 damaging your search rankings, sending visitors to broken links, etc. you should configure your redirection system before changing the permalink structure of your site.

You can add a link redirection system to your do this using 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 301 redirections using redirection plugins or get professional assistance)

Congratulations! Now you know about the built-in system WordPress uses 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

***