Wouldn’t it be great if after publishing new content on your website or blog, the following could take place … all from your web address:

• Potential visitors could easily gain an understanding of what your post was about,
• Google would be able to discover your posts faster,
• Every single post published on your site would have a unique identifier, making your site easier to manage.

Well, this is what permalinks let you do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

What’s A Permalink?

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 URL that others use to link to articles or sections of your site or the links you send in emails pointing to content items on your blog. Permalinks are often called “pretty” URLs.

Permalinks make the URL pointing to each post on your blog permanent, hence a perma-link.

Permalinks – Why Do You Need To Use Them?

Hopefully, you are probably aware by now that, WordPress is one of the best Content Management Systems you can use when it comes to SEO.

WordPress is not only well optimized straight out of the box, but its SEO aspect can be further improved with SEO plugins.

If you are looking to optimize the SEO aspect of your site or blog, then you should not ignore the importance of your URLs. Search engines like Google tend to give special significance to the URL structure of a site.

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

Now … let’s take a look at why you may need to use permalinks in WordPress.

Typically, 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 find data inside its database. It doesn’t really mean much to anyone, and it doesn’t help your website with on-site search engine optimization.

As you can see from the screenshot image below taken from Google search results, many WordPress site owners haven’t set up their permalinks to publish search optimized content …

Although these sites are still getting their content indexed on search engines, they are potentially missing out on extra SEO benefits.

To get the best possible SEO benefit from using WordPress and improve your site’s traffic results, you should configure 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 and archived posts, so your content can go from this …

To something like this …

Out of the box, WordPress post URLs are not very SEO-friendly. This step-by-step tutorial explains how to set up your WordPress permalinks to get better indexing results in Google.

Setting Up WordPress Permalinks

In your WordPress dashboard section click on, Settings > Permalinks …

This will bring up 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 will need to specify a different Permalink structure than the default.

Common Settings

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

(Change your permalink settings to create search engine-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/europe-cruises/three-best-european-river-cruise-destinations

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=1846

(Using post name permalinks helps readers and search engines understand what the page is about)

Creating Pretty URL Tags In Custom Structure

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

• %year% – The year the post is published, four digits (e.g. ‘2011’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘06’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘14’)
• %hour% – The hour your post is published (e.g. ‘21’)
• %minute% – The minute your post is published (e.g. ‘35’)
• %second% – The exact second your post is published (e.g. ‘14’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘610’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of your 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 characters converted to lower case and punctuation marks removed) in the URL. Tip: You can edit the URL text 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 adding the /%postname%/ tag.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

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

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

• 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/uncategorized/’.

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

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

To this …

If you leave the fields blank WordPress uses the defaults.

Remember to save your changes when 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, it’s important 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 expert and author of the WordPress SEO plugin Joost de Valk, here are some things to keep in mind 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 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 decrease the SEO benefit.
• If you plan 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 using category vs no category there is no ideal permalink structure to use. Use the permalink structure you think will suit your needs best. Many SEO experts and webmasters recommend making your post URLs short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We cover WordPress categories in other tutorials.

Avoid Setting Up Permalink Syntaxes That Date Your Posts

Another great tip from Joost de Valk is that unless you run a news website or blog or you have a special reason to add dates to your post URLs, avoid choosing date-based permalink options when configuring your URLs.

(Avoid using URL structures that date your content)

Although setting up URL structures that time-stamp your posts is better that using no permalinks at all from an SEO point-of-view, visitors are less likely to click on posts that are several years old, even if the content is relevant to what they are searching for.

What If My Site Has Content?

Normally, your permalinks should be configured when you perform a new WordPress installation. This should be part of your site planning process.

If your website is already established 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 to be done, as doing so can create issues and errors.

301 Redirects

As you’ve seen in earlier screenshots, some WordPress users (or their web developers) 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 want to improve your SEO. Maybe your website was originally set up to display post dates in your web address and now all of your content is showing as being old and you want to remove the date tags in your URLs.

To modify your permalink structure without negatively affecting your site’s SEO or rankings you should use ‘301 redirects’ to point links set up using the previous URL syntax to web URLs using the new permalinks syntax.

Search engines interpret a ’301′ code as a link that has permanently moved. 301 redirection is the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect visitors to new site destinations and avoid running into page errors when following an old link.

To effectively change your syntax and avoid SEO problems, sending visitors to broken links, etc. you will need to set up a 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 use the services of a professional to help you set up and redirect your permalinks correctly to avoid issues and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up 301 redirects using a WordPress redirection plugin or use the services of a professional)

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, see the WordPress codex below:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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