Wouldn’t it be great if you could simply add a new page to your WordPress site, and the following took place … all from your page address:

• Potential site visitors could quickly assess what the content is about,
• Search engines could discover your posts faster,
• Every single item of content added to your site would have its own unique ID, making things easier to manage.

Well, with permalinks this is very easy to do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – What Are They?

A permalink is the permanent URL to your individual WordPress posts, categories and other taxonomies (a way to group things together) like archives.

A permalink is the web address that people and search engines will use to link to your articles or sections of your site or the links you send in emails pointing to your posts. Permalinks are often called “pretty” URLs.

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

Why Do You Need To Use Permalinks?

Hopefully, you probably know by now that, WordPress is one of the best Content Management Systems available when it comes to SEO.

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

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

Permalinks are used to turn links on your site into “prettier” 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 why it’s best to set up permalinks if publishing content in WordPress.

Typically, a default WordPress installation uses a link-naming 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 data inside its database. It does not mean anything to search engines or visitors, and it doesn’t help your website with on-site SEO.

As the screenshot image taken directly from Google search results below shows, many WordPress users are still using default settings when publishing content online …

Although these sites are still getting their content indexed on search engines, these site owners are potentially missing out on additional SEO benefits.

To get greater SEO benefit from using and improve your site’s traffic results, you should set up your permalinks structure to make it more SEO-friendly by displaying relevant keywords in your URL, instead of meaningless characters.

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

To this …

In this tutorial, you will learn how to configure the Permalinks section of your WordPress site to display your posts using SEO-friendly URLs instead of the out-of-the-box URL structure and help every new post you publish get better indexing in Google.

How To Configure Your WordPress Permalinks

From your WP dashboard menu, select 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 “pretty” permalink instead for our posts. To do this, we will need to specify a different Permalink structure than the default.

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/travel-deals/5-best-european-river-cruise-destinations

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=2681

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

Using Permalink Tags

“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. ‘2014’)
• %monthnum% – The month the post is published (e.g. ‘04’)
• %day% – The day the post gets published (e.g. ‘16’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘11’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘07’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘29’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘1945’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted version of the 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 lower case letters and punctuation marks deleted) in the URL. Tip: You can edit the wording 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 ‘Custom Structure’.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

If you need to set up custom structures for your tag and category archive pages you can do this in this section.

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

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

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

So, if you add the following to your permalinks Optional > Category base settings field …

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

To something like this …

If you leave the fields blank the default settings will be used.

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 greater SEO benefit out of 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 Joost de Valk, here are a few points 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 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 copy or share and reduce 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.

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. Choose the permalink structure you think will suit your needs best. Your web addresses should be short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We provide detailed information about WordPress categories in another article.

Create Timeless Posts

Another tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your site is a news blog or you have any special reason to create dated website URLs, avoid selecting date-based permalinks when setting up your site’s URLs.

(Avoid setting up URL structures that date your content)

Although using permalinks that date your content is better that using no permalinks at all from an SEO aspect, visitors are less likely to click on posts that are a couple of years old, even if the content is relevant to what they are searching for.

Changing Permalinks In Blog With Indexed Posts

Normally, your site’s permalinks should be set up when you perform a new WordPress installation. 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 want to change the permalink structure, make sure that this is really necessary, as changing permalinks after your site has been up and running for a while can 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 whoever set up their site) seem to be completely unaware of the SEO-friendly URLs feature of WordPress.

Maybe when you started out, 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 URLs and now all of your posts are perceived as being out-of-date and you want to delete the date tags in your permalinks.

To change your permalinks without impacting your site’s SEO in a negative way you should add ‘301 redirects’ to point all links that were set up using the old permalinks syntax to page URLs that use the new permalinks syntax.

A ’301′ code is interpreted by search engines as a link that has permanently moved to another destination. 301 redirects are the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect visitors to new website destinations and avoid page errors when clicking on an old link.

To create an effective syntax change and avoid damaging your search rankings, sending visitors to broken links, etc. you should set up your redirection system before changing the permalink structure of your site.

You can site using a WP redirection plugin 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 issues and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up 301 redirections using plugins or get professional assistance)

Congratulations! Now you know about the built-in system WordPress uses to display SEO-friendly URLs for your posts. To learn more about using Permalinks, see the official WordPress documentation below:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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