Wouldn’t it be great if you could just add content to your website, and the following took place … just from your post address:

• Site visitors could easily assess what the page was about,
• Google could easily find your post and correctly index the content for better search rankings,
• Every single content item you create on your site would have a unique identifier, making your site easier to manage.

Well, with permalinks you can!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – Definition

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

A permalink is the web address that visitors and search engines will use to link to your articles or sections of your site or the links you send in an email pointing readers to a particular post on your blog. Some people also call permalinks “pretty” URLs.

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

Why Do You Need To Use Permalinks?

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

WordPress is not only well optimized straight out of the box, but its SEO aspect can be easily enhanced using SEO plugins.

If you focus on the SEO aspect of your site or blog, then you cannot ignore the importance of its URLs. Google places considerable weight on the structure of a site’s URLs when indexing its content.

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

Now … let’s review the reason why it’s best to use permalinks 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 …

The link structure shown above is used by WordPress to locate data inside its database. It doesn’t really mean anything to search engines or visitors, and it doesn’t help your site with on-site search engine optimization.

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

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

To get maximum SEO benefit out of using and improve your site’s rankings, you should set up your permalinks structure to make it more search engine-friendly by displaying relevant keywords in your URL, instead of meaningless numbers and symbols.

WordPress offers you the ability to create a custom URL structure for your published posts, so your pages can easily go from something that is non-SEO friendly like this …

To something like this …

Out of the box, WordPress post URLs are not very search engine-friendly. In this tutorial, you will learn how to set up your permalinks in WordPress to display posts with search engine-friendly URLs.

How To Configure Your WordPress Permalinks

In your WP main menu, click on Settings > Permalinks …

This brings 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 “pretty” permalink instead for our posts. To do this, we will need to specify a different Permalink structure than the one set by 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 …

(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/budget-travel/top-ten-european-river-cruises

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=1131

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

How To Create Permalink Tags

“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, displayed as four digits (e.g. ‘2010’)
• %monthnum% – The month your post gets published (e.g. ‘02’)
• %day% – The day the post is published (e.g. ‘05’)
• %hour% – The hour your post gets published (e.g. ‘22’)
• %minute% – The minute the post is published (e.g. ‘32’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘13’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘9180’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted version of your post title. For example, if the post title is “Top Five Budget Travel Tips!”, the postname tag will convert this into “top-five-budget-travel-tips” (all letters converted to lower case and no punctuation symbol) 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 selecting the ‘Custom Structure’ option and using the /%postname%/ tag.

Optional Permalink Settings

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

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

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

For example, using “recipes” as your category base would display your category links 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 looking like this …

To something like this …

If you leave the optional settings 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 Notes

Set Up Your Categories

To get the optimal 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 expert and author of the WordPress SEO plugin Joost de Valk, here are a few points to consider 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 decrease the SEO benefit.
• If you are going to post content under multiple categories, then we recommend not using the category tag in your permalink structure.

Ultimately, when it comes to using category vs no category there really is no ”better” permalink structure to use. We recommend choosing the permalink structure you think will suit your site best and that will make your post URLs short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We cover WordPress categories in another article.

Avoid Setting Up Permalinks That Date Your Content

Another useful tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your aim is to run a news blog or there is a special reason why you need to add dates to your post URLs, it’s best to avoid choosing date-based permalink options for your URLs.

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

Although using URL structures that time-stamp your posts is better that using no permalinks at all from an SEO perspective, visitors are less likely to click on a post that is several years old, even if the content is relevant to the answers they are searching for.

Changing Permalinks In Blog With Published Content

Normally, your permalinks should be set up when you first install WordPress. This should be part of your site planning process.

If your website or blog has been running for a while or your site already has many 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 making changes to permalinks after your site has already been running for a while can create SEO issues and loss of traffic.

Use 301 Redirects

As you’ve seen in the above screenshots of actual search results, many WordPress site owners (or their web developers) are unaware of the permalinks feature of WordPress.

Maybe when you started, your site used the default WordPress permalinks and now you want to optimize your site better for search engines. Perhaps 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 delete the date tags of the permalinks.

The best way to edit your permalinks without affecting your site’s SEO or rankings in a negative way is to add ‘301 redirects’ to reassign all links using the old URL structure to web addresses using the new syntax.

A code ‘301’ is interpreted by search engines as a link that has been permanently moved elsewhere. 301 redirection is the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect visitors to new web page destinations and avoid ‘404’ (Page not found) errors when they click on an old link.

To effectively change your permalink structure and avoid damaging your rankings, sending visitors to broken links, etc. you will need to set up your redirection system before changing the permalink structure of your site.

You can site using a WordPress redirection plugin like Simple 301 Redirects, or Redirection, or get a professional to help you set up and redirect your permalinks correctly to avoid any problems and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up 301 redirects using plugins or use the services of a professional)

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

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