Wouldn’t it be great if after adding new content to your site, the following could take place … just from your post URL:

• Visitors could determine what your post was about,
• Search engines would easily find your page and correctly classify its content to improve your search rankings,
• Each item of content you create on your website would have its own unique identifier, making your content easier to manage.

Well, with WordPress permalinks you can easily do this!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – What Are They?

A permalink is the permanent URL to your individual posts, categories and other taxonomies (a way to group things together) like archives.

A permalink is the web address 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 posts on your site. Permalinks are often called “pretty” URLs.

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

Permalinks – Why Do We Need To Use Them?

Hopefully, you are probably aware that, WordPress is one of the best Content Management Systems available when it comes to SEO.

WordPress is not only great for SEO out of the box, but its SEO aspect can be easily fine tuned using excellent SEO plugins.

If you are looking to optimize the SEO aspect of your site, then you should not ignore the importance of your site’s URLs. Google places considerable weight on the URL structure of your site.

Permalinks are used to turn links on your site into memorable 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 should use permalinks when publishing content in WordPress.

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

The link structure shown above is used by WordPress to locate information inside your database. It does not help your site with on-site SEO.

As the screenshot from Google search listings below shows, many site owners have not configured their permalinks …

Although Google is clearly still indexing the above sites, they are missing out on extra SEO benefits.

To get the maximum SEO benefit out of using and improve your site’s rankings, you will want to make sure to 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 and archived posts, so your content can easily go from something that is non-SEO friendly like this …

To this …

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

Changing Your WordPress Permalinks

Log into your WP dashboard and 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 search engine friendly URL instead for our posts. To do this, we 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 search engine-friendly URLs …

(Change 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/cruise-travel/romantic-cruise-holiday-deals

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=303

(Using post name permalinks helps readers and search engines understand what your post is about)

Pretty URL Tags

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

• %year% – The year of the post, four digits (e.g. ‘2014’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘06’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘08’)
• %hour% – The hour your post is published (e.g. ‘21’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘24’)
• %second% – The exact second the post gets published (e.g. ‘28’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘8475’)
• %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 letters converted to lower case and exclamation symbols removed) in the URL. Tip: You can edit the wording 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 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 using the /%postname%/ tag.

Optional Permalink Settings

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

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

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

For example, using “topics” as your category base would make your category links display as ‘http://domain.com/topics/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 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 greater SEO 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 things 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. uses a relevant keyword or keyword phrase), you may want to use categories 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 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 category vs no category there really is no ”better” permalink structure to use. Use a permalink structure that you think will suit your site best. Your post URLs should be short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We provide detailed information about WordPress categories in other tutorials.

Avoid Time-Stamping URLs

Another great tip from Joost de Valk is that unless you plan to run a news website or you have any special reason to create dated web addresses, it’s best to avoid selecting date-based permalink syntax for your blog’s URLs.

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

Although using permalinks that date 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 that is several years old, even if the content is relevant to the answers they are searching for.

Changing Permalinks In Blog With Published Posts

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

If your website has been running for a while or your site already has many posts indexed in the search engines and you want to change the permalink structure, make sure that this is really necessary, as making changes to permalinks after your site has already been up and running for a while could create issues and errors.

301 Redirects

As you’ve seen earlier, many website owners (or their web developers) seem to be completely unaware of the permalinks 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 originally set up 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.

The best way to edit your permalink structure without negatively affecting your site’s SEO or existing rankings is to use ‘301 redirections’ to point all links set up using the old permalink structure to URLs using the new syntax.

Search engines interpret a ’301′ code as a link that has permanently been moved to another location. 301 redirects are the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect visitors to new web page destinations and avoid page errors when following an old link.

To create an effective permalink structure change and avoid damaging your search rankings, sending visitors to broken links, 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 or blog using a 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 problems 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 results. To learn more about using Permalinks, refer to the official WordPress documentation here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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