Wouldn’t it be great if you could publish content on your site, and the following happened … just from your page URL:

• Potential visitors could quickly glean what the post is about,
• Search engines would easily find your posts and correctly index their content to improve your search rankings,
• Every item of content published on your site would have its own unique ID, making things 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 URL that people and search engines use to link to your articles or sections of your site or the links you send in an email pointing to posts on your site. Some people also call permalinks “pretty” URLs.

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

Permalinks – Why Use Them?

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

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

If you are looking to optimize the SEO aspect of your website, then you should not ignore the importance of your URLs. Search engines like Google place considerable weight on the URL structure of a site.

Permalinks are used to make the 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 review why you may need to set up permalinks in WordPress.

Normally, a default WordPress installation uses a non-search engine friendly URL-naming structure for your posts that looks like this …

The link structure shown above is used by WordPress to find data within your database. It doesn’t really mean much to anyone, and it doesn’t help your site with on-site search engine optimization.

As you can see from the image below taken directly from Google search listings, many WordPress site owners have not yet set up their permalinks …

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

To get optimal SEO benefit from using and improve your site’s rankings, 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 allows you 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 …

By default, WordPress URLs are not very SEO-friendly. This step-by-step tutorial explains how to set up your permalinks in WordPress to automatically help you get better indexing in search engines like Google.

Changing Your WordPress Permalinks

In your WordPress dashboard select, 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 default.

Common Settings – Permalinks

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/travel-tips/best-value-european-river-cruises

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=9449

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

How To Use Permalink Tags

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

• %year% – The year your post is published, four digits (e.g. ‘2015’)
• %monthnum% – The month your post gets published (e.g. ‘01’)
• %day% – The day your post gets published (e.g. ‘27’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘02’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘20’)
• %second% – The exact second the post gets published (e.g. ‘52’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘4577’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of the post title. For example, if your 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 exclamation symbols) in the URL. Tip: You can edit the URL 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 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 choosing the ‘Custom Structure’ setting and using the /%postname%/ tag.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

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

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

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

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

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

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 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 – Additional Notes

Set Up Your Categories

To get the optimal SEO benefit out of using Permalinks, you will need 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 expert Joost de Valk, here are a few points to keep in mind if you are wondering whether or not to add categories to your permalinks:

• 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 and decrease the SEO benefit.
• Do you plan to post content under only one category or multiple categories? If you are going 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 category vs no category there is no ideal permalink structure to use. Choose the permalink structure you think will suit your site best. Your web addresses should be short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We cover WordPress categories in another tutorial.

Make Your Posts Timeless

Another tip from Joost de Valk is that unless you run a news website or you have any special reason to add dates to your URLs, it’s best to avoid selecting date-based permalink options when configuring your site’s URLs.

(Avoid using URL structures that time-stamp your posts)

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

What About Changing Permalinks In Sites With Published Content?

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 site has been running for a while 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 something that absolutely needs doing, as doing so could create issues and loss of traffic.

Add 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 you started out using the default WordPress permalinks and now you would like to optimize your site better for search engines. Maybe your site was configured to display post dates in your URLs and now all of your posts are perceived as being outdated and you want to delete the date tags of your URLs.

The best way to change your permalink structure without impacting your site’s SEO in a negative way is to add ‘301 redirects’ to point all links that use the previous permalinks syntax to page URLs using the new permalink structure.

Search engines interpret a ’301′ code 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 site destinations and avoid running into ‘404’ (Page not found) errors when they click on an old link.

To create an effective syntax change and avoid SEO problems, sending visitors to error pages, etc. you will need to install and set up a redirection system before messing with the permalink structure of your site.

You can WP site using a redirection plugin like Simple 301 Redirects, or Redirection, or get a professional to assist you with setting up and redirecting your permalinks correctly to avoid problems and troubleshoot any errors.

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

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

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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