Wouldn’t it be great if you could publish a new page on your site, and the following happened … all from your post address:

• Users could understand what your post is about,
• Search engines would be able to find your pages faster,
• Each post added to your site would have a unique identifier, making things easier to manage.

Well, this is what WordPress permalinks let you do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – Definition

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

A permalink is the URL that others will use to link to your posts or sections of your site or the links you send in emails pointing to your posts. Some people also call permalinks “pretty” URLs.

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

Why Use Permalinks?

Hopefully, you are probably aware by now that, WordPress is one of the best CMS tools you can use when it comes to publishing search engines optimized content.

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

If you focus on the SEO aspect of your website, then you cannot ignore the importance of its site’s URLs. Google tends to give special consideration to the URL structure of your site.

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

Now … let’s take a look at the reason why you should set up permalinks when publishing content in WordPress.

By default, a 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 locate data within your 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 taken directly from Google search listings below shows, many WordPress users are still using out-of-the-box permalink settings when publishing their content online …

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

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

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

To this …

By default, WordPress URLs are not very search engine-friendly. In this step-by-step tutorial, you will learn how to configure your permalinks in WordPress to help your content rank better in search engines like Google.

Configuring Your WordPress Permalinks

Log into your WordPress dashboard area and select 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 a search engine friendly URL instead for our posts. To do this, we will need to specify a different Permalink structure than the one set by 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/budget-cruises/river-cruise-holiday-bargains

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=5613

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

Search Engine-Friendly 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. ‘02’)
• %day% – The day the post is published (e.g. ‘17’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘05’)
• %minute% – The minute the post is published (e.g. ‘38’)
• %second% – The exact second your post is published (e.g. ‘30’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘7648’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of your post title. For example, if your post title is ”It Ain’t Worth Doin’ No More!”, the postname tag will convert this into “it-aint-worth-doin-no-more” (all characters converted to lower case and removed punctuation symbols) in the URL. Tip: You can edit this wording 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

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

This changes the ‘base’ category or tag URLs using the following structure:

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

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

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

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

To something like this …

If you leave the fields blank WordPress uses the defaults.

Remember to save any 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

Use Short, Descriptive Categories

To get the best 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 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 name is short and descriptive (e.g. adds a relevant keyword or keyword phrase to your URL), 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 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 really is no ideal permalink structure to use. We recommend choosing the permalink structure you think will suit your site best and that will make your site’s web addresses short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We provide detailed information about WordPress categories in another tutorial.

Create Timeless Posts

Another tip from Joost de Valk is that unless you plan to run a news website or there is a special reason why you need to add dates to your URLs, avoid selecting date-based permalink options when configuring your blog’s URLs.

(Avoid using 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, people are less likely to click on a post that is a couple of years old, even if the content is relevant to what they are searching for.

Changing Permalinks In Site With Indexed Content

Normally, your site’s permalinks should be set up when you install a new WordPress site. This should be part of your website 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 would like to change the permalink structure, make sure that this is really necessary, as making changes to permalinks after your site has already been running for a while can create SEO issues and loss of traffic.

Add 301 Redirection

As you’ve seen in the above screenshots of actual search results, some WordPress users (or their web developers) seem to be unaware of the permalinks feature of WordPress.

Maybe when you started out, your site used the default WordPress URL structure and now you would like to improve your site’s SEO. Perhaps your website was originally set up 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 in the URLs.

To modify your URL structure without negatively impacting your site’s SEO you will need to add ‘301 redirections’ to point links set up using the previous permalinks syntax to post URLs that use the new permalink syntax.

A ’301′ code is interpreted by search engines as a link that has permanently been relocated to another address. 301 redirection is the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect users to new web page destinations and avoid running into page errors when following an old link.

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

You can WordPress site using a 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 URL redirections using redirection plugins or use the services of a professional)

Congratulations! Now you know about the built-in system WordPress uses to display search engine-friendly URLs for your posts and improve your search search rankings. To learn more about using Permalinks, refer to the official WordPress documentation here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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