Wouldn’t it be great if after publishing a new page on your WordPress website or blog, the following could take place … just from your page URL:

• Potential visitors to your site could easily determine what the post was about,
• Search engines would be able to easily discover your pages and correctly index their content for better search rankings,
• Every content item created on your site would have its own unique identifier, making your site easier to manage.

Well, this is what permalinks let you do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – Definition

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

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

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

Why Use Permalinks?

As you are probably aware, WordPress is one of the best CMS tools you can use when it comes to publishing search engines optimized content.

WordPress is not only great for SEO out of the box, but there are excellent SEO plugins you can install that will help to enhance its SEO aspect further.

If you are looking to optimize the SEO aspect of your site or blog, then you should not ignore the importance of its site’s URLs. Search engines like Google place considerable weight on the structure of URLs when indexing site pages.

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

Now … let’s turn our attention to the reason why you may need to configure your permalinks in WordPress.

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

WordPress uses the link structure with a string query shown above to locate information inside your database. It does not help your website with on-site SEO.

As the screenshot from Google search listings below shows, many WordPress site owners have not configured their sites to use permalinks …

Although Google is still indexing the above sites, the owners of these sites are potentially missing out on additional SEO benefits.

To get the greatest SEO benefit out of using WordPress and improve your site’s traffic results, you will want to make sure to 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 and archived posts, so your pages can easily go from this …

To something with an SEO-friendly URL like this …

By default, WordPress URLs are not very SEO-friendly. In this tutorial, you will learn how to set up the Permalinks section of your WordPress site to display your posts using SEO-friendly URLs.

Configuring WordPress Permalinks

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

Permalinks > Common 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/europe-cruises/river-cruise-holiday-bargains

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=5258

(Using permalinks helps visitors understand what your content is about)

How To Create Search Engine-Friendly 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. ‘2011’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘11’)
• %day% – The day the post is published (e.g. ‘25’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘05’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘52’)
• %second% – The exact second your post gets published (e.g. ‘41’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘3468’)
• %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 lower case letters and removed punctuation marks) in the URL. Tip: You can always edit this text 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 adding the /%postname%/ tag in ‘Custom Structure’.

Optional Permalink Settings

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

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

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

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

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

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

To something like this …

If you leave the optional settings fields blank WordPress uses the defaults.

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 – Tips

Use Descriptive Categories

To get the maximum SEO benefit from using Permalinks, it’s important 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 things 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 is short and descriptive (e.g. adds a relevant keyword or keyword phrase to your URL), 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 share or copy and reduce 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 ideal permalink structure to use. Use a permalink structure that you think will suit your site best. Your web address should be short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We cover WordPress categories in another article.

Don’t Use Date Permalinks

Another tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your site provides news or time-specific information, or there is a special reason why you need to date your content, avoid using date-based permalink syntax for your blog’s URLs.

(Avoid setting up permalinks that date your content)

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 About Sites With Published Content?

Normally, your site’s permalinks should be configured when you create a new WordPress site. This should be part of your website planning process.

If your site is already established or your site already has a lot of posts 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 can create issues and errors.

301 Redirects

As you’ve seen in earlier screenshots, many WordPress site owners (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 permalinks and now you want to improve your site’s SEO. Maybe your site was configured to display post dates in your web address and now all of your content is perceived as being outdated and you want to remove the date tags of your URLs.

The best way to edit your permalink structure without negatively impacting your site’s SEO or existing rankings is to add ‘301 redirects’ to point links that use the old permalinks syntax to web URLs that use the new permalinks structure.

Search engines interpret a ’301′ code as a link that has permanently moved to another location. 301 redirection is the most efficient and search engine friendly way to redirect visitors to new website destinations and avoid ”page not found” errors if clicking on an old link.

To effectively change your permalink syntax and avoid SEO problems, sending visitors to error pages, etc. you will need to add a 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 use the services of a professional to assist you with setting up and redirecting your permalinks correctly to avoid any problems and troubleshoot any errors.

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

Congratulations! Now you know how to change your WordPress permalinks to display SEO-friendly URLs for your posts and improve your search results. For additional information on using Permalinks, refer to the official WordPress documentation here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

***