Wouldn’t it be great if you could just publish a new post on your website, and the following would then take place … all from your post URL:

• Site visitors could glean what your page is about,
• Search engines would find your posts faster,
• Every content item added to your website would have its own unique ID, making your site easier to manage.

Well, this is what WordPress permalinks let you do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – Definition

Permalinks are the permanent URLs to your individual WordPress posts, categories and other taxonomies (a way to group things together) like archives.

A permalink is the URL that other people use to link to articles or sections of your site or the links you send in an email pointing readers to a specific post on your site. Some people refer to permalinks as “pretty” URLs.

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

Why Do You Need To Use Permalinks?

As you probably know, WordPress is one of the best Content Management Systems you can use when it comes to SEO.

WordPress is not only well optimized right out of the box, but there are SEO plugins you can install that can easily help to fine tuned its SEO aspect.

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

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

Now … let’s review the reason why it’s best to configure your permalinks in WordPress.

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

The link structure shown above is used by WordPress to find information 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 the screenshot image below shows, many WordPress users have not configured their sites to use permalinks …

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

To get optimal 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 SEO-friendly by displaying relevant keywords in your URL, instead of meaningless numbers and symbols.

WordPress gives you the ability to create a custom URL structure for your published posts, so your content can easily go from this …

To something with an SEO-friendly URL like this …

Out of the box, WordPress URLs are not very search engine-friendly. In this step-by-step tutorial, you will learn how to configure your WordPress permalinks to help you get better indexing results in Google.

How To Configure WordPress Permalinks

Log into your WordPress admin area and 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 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 SEO-friendly URLs …

(Configure 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/cruise-travel/top-five-european-river-cruises

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=2418

(Using permalinks helps visitors and search engines understand what your page is about)

Pretty Permalink Tags

“Pretty” URLs, 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. ‘2013’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘08’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘29’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘01’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘26’)
• %second% – The exact second your post gets published (e.g. ‘54’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘6612’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted 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 exclamation marks removed) in the URL. Tip: You can always edit the words 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 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 adding the /%postname%/ tag in the ‘Custom Structure’ option.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

Here you can set up custom structures for your category and tag archive page URLs.

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

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

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

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 something like this …

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

Remember to save your changes when you are 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 – Tips

Set Up 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, 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 or not to add categories to your permalink structure:

• If your domain is short and 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 plan 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 is no perfect permalink structure to use. Use a permalink structure 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 tutorial.

Avoid Setting Up URL Syntaxes That Time-Stamp Your Posts

Another tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your site is a news site or you have any special reason to add dates to your URLs, avoid using date-based permalink options when setting up your URLs.

(Avoid using permalinks that time-stamp your content)

People 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 About An Established Site?

Normally, it’s best to configure your permalinks when you create a new WordPress site. This should be part of your site planning process.

If your website or blog is already established 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 been going for a while could create issues and errors.

Use 301 Redirects

As you’ve seen in the above screenshots of actual search results, some WordPress users (or whoever set up their site) are completely unaware of the search-friendly URLs feature of WordPress.

Maybe when you started out, your site used the default WordPress URL structure and now you want to optimize your site better for search engines. Maybe your website or blog was originally set up to display post dates in your web address and now all of your posts are showing as being 2-3 years old and you want to delete the date tags of the permalinks.

To edit your permalink structure without affecting your site’s SEO in a negative way you will need to add ‘301 redirects’ to point all links that were set up using the old URL structure to web addresses that use the new permalinks syntax.

Search engines interpret a ’301′ code as a link that has permanently moved to another destination. 301 redirects are the most efficient and search engine friendly way to redirect users to new site destinations and avoid page errors when following an old link.

To create an effective permalink structure change and avoid damaging your search rankings, sending visitors to error pages, etc. you should add a redirection system before messing with the permalink structure of your site.

You can site using a 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 issues and troubleshoot any errors.

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

Congratulations! Now you know how to set up your site’s permalinks to display search engine-friendly URLs for your posts and improve your search results. To learn more about using Permalinks, refer to the WordPress codex here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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