Wouldn’t it be great if after adding a new page to your WordPress website, the following happened … just from your page URL:

• Potential visitors to your site could gain an understanding of what your post was about,
• Search engines would discover your posts faster,
• Every piece of content on your site would have a unique ID, making your site easier to manage.

Well, with permalinks you can!

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 URL that others use to link to your posts or sections of your site or the links you send in an email pointing readers to a specific post on your site. Permalinks are often called “pretty” URLs.

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

Why Do You Need To Use Permalinks?

Hopefully, 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 excellent SEO plugins you can install that can help to fine tuned its SEO aspect further.

If you are looking to optimize the SEO aspect of your website, then you cannot ignore the importance of its site’s URLs. Google places considerable weight on the structure of URLs when indexing its pages.

Permalinks can be used to make the 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 should use permalinks when publishing content in WordPress.

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

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

As you can see from the screenshot image below, many site owners have not set up their permalinks …

Although Google is still indexing the above sites, the owners of these sites are potentially missing out on additional 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 lets you create a custom URL structure for your published posts, so your pages can easily go from this …

To this …

By default, WordPress post URLs are not very search engine-friendly. In this step-by-step tutorial, you will learn how to set up the Permalinks section of your WordPress site to automatically help you get better indexing results in search engines.

Changing WordPress Permalinks

In your WordPress admin menu, 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 “pretty” permalinks instead for our posts. To do this, we need to specify a different Permalink structure than the one set by default.

Permalinks > Common Settings

In the Common Settings section, select Custom Structure, then add one or more ‘tags’ (see below) to create SEO-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/europe-travel/how-to-save-money-on-cruise-travel

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=9907

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

Creating 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. ‘2010’)
• %monthnum% – The month the post is published (e.g. ‘12’)
• %day% – The day the post is published (e.g. ‘06’)
• %hour% – The hour your post is published (e.g. ‘03’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘07’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘56’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘9347’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted version of your post title. For example, if the 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 always 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’.

Optional Permalink Settings

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

You can change the ‘base’ category or tag of your URLs using the following syntax:

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

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

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

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 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 – Additional Info

Use Descriptive Categories

To get the optimal benefit out of using Permalinks, remember 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 things to consider if you are wondering whether or not to add categories to your permalink structure:

• If your category is short and descriptive (e.g. adds a relevant keyword or keyword phrase to your URL), 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 share or copy and reduce 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 adding category vs no category there really is no ideal permalink structure to use. Use the permalink structure that you think will suit your site best. SEO experts recommend making your post URLs short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We provide more information about WordPress categories in another tutorial.

Make Your Content Timeless

Another tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your site is a news site or there is a special reason why you need to create dated post URLs, it’s best to avoid selecting date-based permalink syntax when configuring your blog’s URLs.

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

Although using URL structures that time-stamp 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 several years old, even if the content is relevant to what they are searching for.

Changing Permalinks In An Established Site

Normally, your site’s permalinks should be configured when you perform a new WordPress installation. 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 want to change the permalink structure, make sure that this is really something that needs doing, as changing permalinks after your site has already been running for a while can create issues and loss of traffic.

Use 301 Redirection

As you’ve seen earlier, many website owners (or whoever set up their site) are unaware of the search-friendly URLs feature of WordPress.

Maybe when you started out, your site used the default WordPress URL structure and now you want to optimize your site better for search engines. Maybe your website or blog was originally set up to display post dates in your web address and now all of your content is showing as being old and you want to delete the date portion in the permalinks.

To modify your URL structure without impacting your site’s SEO or existing rankings in a negative way you should add ‘301 redirections’ to reassign all links that use the previous permalink structure to web URLs using the new permalinks syntax.

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

To create an effective permalink syntax change and avoid SEO problems, sending visitors to error pages, etc. you will need to add a redirection system before messing with the permalink structure of your site.

You can site or blog using a redirection plugin 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 WordPress codex below:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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