Wouldn’t it be great if after publishing content on your website or blog, the following happened … just from your URL:

• Site visitors could easily glean what your content was about,
• Google would be able to easily discover your page and correctly classify the content to improve your search results,
• Every piece of content on your website 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?

Permalinks are the permanent URLs to an individual WordPress post, category, or other taxonomy (a way to group things together) like archives.

A permalink is the web address that other people use to link to articles or sections of your site or the links you send in an email pointing to a specific item of content on your website. Permalinks are often called “pretty” URLs.

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

Permalinks – Why 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 there are SEO plugins you can install that will help to finetune its SEO aspect considerably.

If you are looking to optimize the SEO aspect of your website, then you should not ignore the importance of its site’s URLs. Search engines like Google tend to give special significance to the structure of URLs when indexing site pages.

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

Now … let’s take a look at the reason why you may need to set up permalinks if publishing content in WordPress.

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

WordPress uses the above link structure with a string query to find information within its database. It does not mean anything to visitors or search engines, and it doesn’t help your website with on-site SEO.

As you can see from the image below taken from Google search listings, many WordPress users are still using out of the box settings when publishing their content online …

Although Google is still indexing the above sites, they are missing out on extra 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 SEO-friendly by displaying relevant keywords in your URL, instead of meaningless numbers and symbols.

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

To something like this …

By default, WordPress URLs are not very SEO-friendly. This tutorial shows you how to set up the Permalinks section of your WordPress site to help your content rank better in search engines like Google.

Setting Up Your WordPress Permalinks

In your WordPress dashboard section click on, 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 one set by default.

Common Permalink Settings

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

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=4531

(Using permalinks helps search engines and readers understand what your post is about)

Creating Pretty WordPress URLs

“Pretty” URLs, or search engine-friendly URLs, are created by adding one or more ‘tags’ in the Custom Structure field:

• %year% – The year your post is published, four digits (e.g. ‘2012’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘09’)
• %day% – The day the post gets published (e.g. ‘02’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘03’)
• %minute% – The minute your post is published (e.g. ‘44’)
• %second% – The exact second the post gets published (e.g. ‘45’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘8448’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted version of your 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 characters converted to lower case and punctuation symbols removed) 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 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 choosing ‘Custom Structure’ and using the /%postname%/ tag.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

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

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, changing your category base to “news” will display your category links as ‘http://domain.com/news/category_name/’.

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

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

To this …

If you leave these fields blank WordPress uses the defaults.

Remember to save your changes after you have 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 – Tips

Use Short, Descriptive Categories

To get more SEO benefit from using Permalinks, remember 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 plugin developer 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 add the category tag to 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 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 ideal permalink structure to use. Choose a permalink structure you think will suit your needs best. SEO experts recommend making your post URLs 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 site is a news site or you have any special reason to date your content, avoid selecting date-based permalinks when configuring your blog’s URLs.

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

People are less likely to click on posts that are several years old, even if the content is relevant to the answers they are searching for.

What If My Blog Has Lots Of Content?

Normally, your permalinks should be configured 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 something that absolutely needs doing, as doing so could create SEO issues and loss of traffic.

301 Redirection

As you’ve seen in the above screenshots of actual search results, many WordPress users (or their web developers) seem to be unaware of the search-friendly URLs feature of WordPress.

Maybe you started out using the default WordPress permalinks and now you would like to improve your site’s SEO. Perhaps your website or blog was configured to display post dates in your web address and now all of your content is showing as being old and you want to delete the date tags of your URLs.

The best way to edit your permalink structure without negatively affecting your site’s SEO is to add ‘301 redirections’ to point links that use the old URL structure to web addresses that use the new syntax.

Search engines interpret a code ‘301’ as a link that has permanently moved to another destination. 301 redirection is the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect users to new site destinations and avoid ‘404’ (Page not found) errors when they click on an old link.

To effectively change your syntax and avoid damaging your search rankings, sending visitors to error pages, etc. you should install and set up your redirection system before changing the permalink structure of your site.

You can add a link redirection system to your do this using a redirection plugin 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 problems and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up 301 redirections using redirection plugins or get professional help)

Congratulations! Now you know about the built-in system WordPress uses to display search engine-friendly URLs for your posts and improve your search search rankings. To learn more about using Permalinks, refer to the official WordPress documentation here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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