Wouldn’t it be great if after publishing content on your website, the following took place … all from your page URL:

• Visitors could glean what your content is about,
• Google could find your posts faster,
• Every single post created on your website or blog would have its own unique identifier, making things easier to manage.

Well, this is what WordPress permalinks let you do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

What Are Permalinks?

A permalink is the permanent URL to an individual post, category, or other taxonomy (a way to group things together) like archives.

A permalink is the URL that other people use to link to posts or sections of your site or the links you send in an email pointing to articles on your site. Some people also call permalinks “pretty” URLs.

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

Permalinks – Why Do I Need To Use Them?

Hopefully, you probably know by now that, WordPress is one of the best CMS tools 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 further enhanced using SEO plugins.

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

Permalinks are used to turn links on your site into “prettier” and more “search engine friendly” URLs. Permalinks also improve the aesthetics, usability, and forward-compatibility of your links.

Now … let’s see the reason why it’s best to set up permalinks in WordPress.

By default, a WordPress installation uses a link-naming structure for your posts that isn’t search engine friendly and 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 SEO.

As the screenshot image taken directly from Google search listings below shows, many site owners have not configured their permalinks to publish search optimized content online …

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 WordPress and improve your site’s traffic results, you should set up your permalinks structure to make it more search engine-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 content can go from this …

To something like this …

Out of the box, WordPress URLs are not very SEO-friendly. In this step-by-step tutorial, you will learn how to configure the Permalinks section of your WordPress site to display posts with search engine-friendly URLs.

Configuring WordPress Permalinks

From your WP main menu, 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 search engine friendly URLs instead for our posts. To do this, we will need to specify a different Permalink structure than the default.

Common Permalink Settings

In the Common Settings section, select Custom Structure, then add one or more ‘tags’ (see below) to create search engine-friendly URLs …

(Set up 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/cruise-deals/how-to-save-money-on-cruise-travel

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=7681

(Using post name permalinks helps visitors and search engines understand what the content 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. ‘2013’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘12’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘12’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘21’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘59’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘48’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘2069’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted version of the post title. For example, if your 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 no exclamation marks) 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 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’ option and using the /%postname%/ tag.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

This section lets you configure custom structures for your tag and category page URLs.

You can change the ‘base’ category or tag URLs using the following syntax:

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

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

So, if you add the following to your permalinks Optional > Category base settings section …

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

To something like this …

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

Remember to save your changes when 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 – Additional Info

Set Up Your Categories

To get more 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 expert Joost de Valk, here are a few things to keep in mind if you are wondering whether or not to add categories to your permalink structure:

• If your category name 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 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 it’s recommended that you do not use the category tag in your permalink structure.

Ultimately, when it comes to adding category vs no category there is no ”better” permalink structure to use. Use a permalink structure that you think will suit your site best. Your post URLs should be short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We cover WordPress categories in another tutorial.

Create Timeless Posts

Another great tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your website is a news blog or there is a special reason why you need to date your content, it’s best to avoid choosing date-based permalink settings when setting up your blog’s URLs.

(Avoid setting up URL structures that time-stamp your posts)

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

What If My Blog Already Has Lots Of Published Posts?

Normally, it’s best to configure your site’s permalinks when you create a new WordPress site. 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 absolutely necessary, as making changes to permalinks after your site has already been going for a while could create SEO issues and loss of traffic.

Add 301 Redirection

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

Maybe when you started, your site used the default WordPress URL structure and now you would like to improve your site’s SEO. Perhaps your website was originally set up to display post dates in your web address and now all of your posts are showing as being two or three years old and you want to remove the date tags of your permalinks.

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

A code ‘301’ is interpreted by search engines as a link that has permanently relocated to another address. 301 redirects are the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect users to new site destinations and avoid ‘404’ (Page not found) errors when following an old link.

To effectively change your permalink structure and avoid SEO problems, sending visitors to broken links, etc. you should set up a redirection system before messing with the permalink structure of your site.

You can add a link redirection system to your site or blog using WP plugins like Simple 301 Redirects, or Redirection, or use the services of a professional to assist you with setting up and redirecting your permalinks correctly to avoid problems and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up link redirections using redirection plugins or use the services of a professional)

Congratulations! Now you know how to change your WordPress site to display SEO-friendly URLs for your posts and improve your search results. To learn more about using Permalinks, refer to the WordPress codex below:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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