Wouldn’t it be great if you could publish a new post on your WordPress website or blog, and the following took place … all from your web address:

• Site visitors could easily understand what the page is about,
• Google would be able to discover your posts faster,
• Each item of content added to your website or blog would have its own unique identifier, making things easier to manage.

Well, this is what WordPress permalinks let you do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

What Are Permalinks?

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

A permalink is the URL that other people will use to link to your posts or sections of your site or the links you send in an email pointing readers to content items on your site. Some people also call permalinks “pretty” URLs.

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

Permalinks – Why Use Them?

As you are probably aware, WordPress is one of the best Content Management Systems available when it comes to publishing search engines optimized content.

WordPress is not only well optimized right out of the box, but the SEO aspect can be considerably improved with SEO plugins.

If you are looking to optimize the SEO aspect of your site or blog, then you should not ignore the importance of its site’s URLs. Google tends to give special consideration to the structure of URLs when indexing pages.

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

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

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

WordPress uses the link with a string query shown above to find information inside its database. It doesn’t really mean anything to search engines or visitors, and it doesn’t help your website with on-site search engine optimization.

As you can see from the screenshot image below, many site owners are still using out-of-the-box settings when publishing their content …

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

To get the best SEO benefit from 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 search engine-friendly by displaying relevant keywords in your URL, instead of meaningless characters.

WordPress lets you create a custom URL structure for your published and archived posts, so your content can go from this …

To something with an SEO-friendly URL like this …

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

How To Configure WordPress Permalinks

In your WP dashboard menu, click on 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.

Common Settings – Permalinks

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 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/romantic-european-river-cruises

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=5300

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

How To Create 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 is published, four digits (e.g. ‘2011’)
• %monthnum% – The month the post gets published (e.g. ‘06’)
• %day% – The day your post gets published (e.g. ‘26’)
• %hour% – The hour your post is published (e.g. ‘18’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘26’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘14’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘7230’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of your post title. For example, if the post title is ”Ten Best Hotels In Cote D’Azur!”, the postname tag will convert this into “ten-best-hotels-in-cote-dazur” (all lower case letters and no exclamation marks) in the URL. Tip: You can edit the URL 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 sanitized 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

In this section, you can set up custom structures for your category and tag page URLs.

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, using “recipes” as your category base will display your category links as ‘http://domain.com/recipes/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 this …

To this …

If you leave the optional settings fields blank WordPress uses the defaults.

Remember to save any 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

Use Descriptive Categories

To get more benefit from 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 and author of the WordPress SEO plugin Joost de Valk, here are some points to consider if you are wondering whether you should add categories to your permalinks or not:

• If 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 reduce 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.

Ultimately, when it comes to adding category vs no category there is no ”better” 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 more information about WordPress categories in another tutorial.

Create Timeless Posts

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

(Avoid setting up permalinks that date your content)

People are less likely to click on a post that is a couple of years old, even if the content is relevant to the answers they are searching for.

Changing Permalinks In An Established Site

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

If your website or blog 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 something that absolutely needs doing, as doing so could create SEO issues and errors.

Use 301 Redirects

As you’ve seen in the above screenshots of actual search results, many site owners (or their web developers) seem to be 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. Perhaps your site was configured to display post dates in your web address and now all of your content is perceived as being out-of-date and you want to delete the date portion of the URLs.

To modify your URL structure without negatively impacting your site’s SEO or existing rankings you should use ‘301 redirects’ to reassign links that use the old URL structure to web URLs using the new permalink structure.

Search engines interpret a ’301′ code as a link that has been permanently relocated to another destination. 301 redirection is the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect visitors to new website destinations and avoid ”page not found” errors when following an old link.

To effectively change your syntax and avoid SEO problems, sending visitors to broken links, etc. you should add your redirection system before messing with the permalink structure of your site.

You can WP site or blog using plugins like Simple 301 Redirects, or Redirection, or get a professional to help you set up and redirect your permalinks correctly to avoid problems and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up a link redirection system for your changed URLs using a WP plugin or get professional assistance)

Congratulations! Now you know how to set up your WordPress site or blog’s permalinks to display search engine-friendly URLs for your posts. For additional information on using Permalinks, refer to the WordPress codex below:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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