Wouldn’t it be great if you could publish new content on your WordPress site, and the following took place … all from your URL:

• Users could tell what the content is about,
• Google could find your pages faster,
• Each content item added to your site would have its own unique identifier, making your site easier to manage.

Well, with WordPress permalinks this can easily be done!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalink – What Is It?

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 emails pointing readers to a particular post on your blog. Permalinks are often called “pretty” URLs.

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

Why Do You Need To Use Permalinks?

As you probably know, WordPress is one of the best CMS tools you can use when it comes to publishing search optimized content.

WordPress is not only well optimized right out of the box, but its SEO aspect can be easily enhanced using excellent SEO plugins.

If you focus on the SEO aspect of your site or blog, then you should not ignore the importance of your site’s URLs. Search engines like Google place considerable weight on the URL structure of your site.

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

Now … let’s take a look at the reason why you may need to use permalinks when publishing content in WordPress.

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

WordPress uses the above link structure with a string query to find data inside your database. It does not mean much to anyone, and it doesn’t help your site with on-site search engine optimization.

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

Although these sites are still getting their content indexed on search engines, they are potentially missing out on extra SEO benefits.

To get optimal 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 numbers and symbols.

WordPress offers the ability to create a custom URL structure for your published and archived posts, so your content can go from this …

To something like this …

In this tutorial, you will learn how to set up your WordPress permalinks to display posts using SEO-friendly URLs instead of the default linking structure and help every new post you add to your site or blog automatically get better indexing results in search engines.

Configuring WordPress Permalinks

In your WordPress dashboard area select, 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 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/budget-cruises/romantic-european-river-cruise-destinations

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=2318

(Using permalinks helps search engines and readers understand what the content is about)

SEO-Friendly Tags

“Pretty” permalinks, or search engine-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. ‘2013’)
• %monthnum% – The month your post gets published (e.g. ‘01’)
• %day% – The day the post gets published (e.g. ‘29’)
• %hour% – The hour your post is published (e.g. ‘15’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘33’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘28’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘604’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of the 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 characters and exclamation symbols deleted) in the URL. Tip: You can edit the words in your post titles 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 selecting ‘Custom Structure’ and using the /%postname%/ tag.

Optional Permalink Settings

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

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

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

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

To this …

If you leave these fields blank the defaults will be used.

Remember to save any changes when 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 more benefit out of using Permalinks, it’s important 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 consider if you are wondering whether you should add categories to your permalink structure or not:

• If your category name 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 share or copy and decrease 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 using category vs no category there really is no perfect permalink structure to use. We recommend choosing the permalink structure you think will suit your needs best and that will make your web address short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We provide detailed information about WordPress categories in another tutorial.

Avoid Time-Stamping Permalink Syntax

Another tip from Joost de Valk is that unless you plan to run a news website or blog or there is a special reason why you need to create dated website URLs, avoid choosing date-based permalinks when setting up your site’s URLs.

(Avoid using URL structures that date your posts)

Although using URL structures that time-stamp your posts may be considered better that using no permalinks at all from an SEO point-of-view, visitors are less likely to click on a post if it is several years old, even if the content is relevant to what they are searching for.

What If My Site Already Has Published Posts?

Normally, your site’s permalinks should be set up when you create a new WordPress site. 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 would like to change the permalink structure, make sure that this is something that absolutely needs doing, as making changes to permalinks after your site has already been going for a while can create SEO issues and errors.

301 Redirection

As you’ve seen earlier, many WordPress site owners (or whoever set up their site) are completely unaware of the permalinks feature of WordPress.

Maybe when you started, your site used the default WordPress permalinks and now you would like to optimize your site better for search engines. Perhaps your website or blog was configured to display post dates in your URLs and now all of your content is showing as being old and you want to remove the date tags in the permalinks.

To edit your permalinks without affecting your site’s SEO or existing rankings in a negative way you should use ‘301 redirections’ to reassign links using the old URL structure to web addresses using the new permalink syntax.

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

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

You can add a link redirection system to your do this using plugins 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 redirection plugins or get professional help)

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

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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