Wouldn’t it be great if after publishing a new page on your WordPress site, the following happened … all from your post address:

• Potential site visitors could quickly tell what your content is about,
• Search engines would discover your pages faster,
• Each piece of content added to your website would have a unique ID, making your content easier to manage.

Well, this is what a WordPress permalink lets you do!

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 other people will use to link to your articles or sections of your site or the links you send in an email 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.

Permalinks – Why Do We Need To Use Them?

Hopefully, by now you are probably aware that, WordPress is one of the best CMS applications you can use when it comes to SEO.

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

If you focus on the SEO aspect of your site or blog, then you should not ignore the importance of your URLs. Google places considerable weight on the structure of URLs when indexing site pages.

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

Now … let’s see why you may need to configure your permalinks when publishing content in WordPress.

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

WordPress uses the above link structure to find data inside your database. It does not mean anything to search engines or visitors, and it doesn’t help your site with on-site SEO.

As the screenshot below shows, many WordPress users haven’t yet set up their sites to publish search optimized content online …

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

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

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

To something with an SEO-friendly URL like this …

In this step-by-step tutorial, you will learn how to set up your WordPress permalinks to display posts using search engine-friendly URLs instead of the default URL structure and help every new post you publish get better indexing in search engines.

Setting Up Your WordPress Permalinks

Log into your WP admin section and click on Settings > Permalinks …

This will bring 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 search engine friendly URLs instead for our posts. To do this, we will 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 SEO-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-travel/how-to-save-money-on-cruise-travel

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=2717

(Using post name permalinks helps readers understand what your page is about)

Creating Permalink Tags

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

• %year% – The year the post gets published, four digits (e.g. ‘2012’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘08’)
• %day% – The day your post is published (e.g. ‘08’)
• %hour% – The hour your post gets published (e.g. ‘20’)
• %minute% – The minute your post gets published (e.g. ‘44’)
• %second% – The exact second your post gets published (e.g. ‘29’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘5097’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of the 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 letters converted to lower case 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 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 selecting ‘Custom Structure’ and adding the /%postname%/ tag.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

If you need to configure custom permalinks for your tag and category page URLs here is where you would do this.

You can change the ‘base’ category or tag for 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 “travel” will make your category links display as ‘http://domain.com/travel/uncategorized/’.

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

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

To this …

If you leave these fields blank WordPress uses the default settings.

Remember to save your changes after 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

Categories

To get maximum benefit out of using Permalinks, you will need 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 plugin developer Joost de Valk, here are some points to keep in mind if you are wondering whether or not to add categories to your permalink structure:

• If your category name 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 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.

Ultimately, when it comes to using category vs no category there is no ”better” permalink structure to use. Choose a permalink structure you think will suit your needs best. Many SEO experts and webmasters recommend making your web addresses short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We provide detailed information about WordPress categories in another tutorial.

Avoid Using Date-Based Permalinks

Another great tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your goal is to run a news site or you have a special reason to create dated web URLs, avoid choosing date-based permalink syntax for your URLs.

(Avoid setting up URL structures that time-stamp your content)

Although setting up permalinks that date your posts may be considered 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 the answers they are searching for.

What About Blogs With Published Posts?

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

If your site is already established or you have a lot of content already 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 could create SEO issues and errors.

301 Redirection

As you’ve seen in the above screenshots of actual search results, many site owners (or their web developers) seem to be completely unaware of the SEO-friendly URLs 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. Maybe your website 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 portion in the permalinks.

To modify your permalinks without negatively affecting your site’s SEO or existing rankings you will need to use ‘301 redirections’ to point all links that were set up using the previous permalink syntax to web URLs using the new syntax.

A ’301′ code is interpreted by search engines as a link that has permanently been moved to another destination. 301 redirects are the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect visitors to new web page destinations and avoid running into page errors if following an old link.

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

You can add a link redirection system to your 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 issues and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up link redirections 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 search rankings. To learn more about using Permalinks, see the official WordPress documentation below:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

***