Wouldn’t it be great if after publishing content on your site, the following happened … all from your post URL:

• Potential site visitors could quickly understand what your post was about,
• Google would find your posts faster,
• Every single post you create on your website or blog would have its own unique identifier, making your site easier to manage.

Well, with permalinks you can easily do this!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – Definition

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 others will use to link to posts or sections of your site or the links you send in an email pointing to your posts. Some people also refer to permalinks as “pretty” URLs.

Permalinks make the URLs to each post on your blog permanent, hence a perma-link.

Permalinks – Why Do We Need To Use Them?

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

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

If you focus on the SEO aspect of your website, then you cannot ignore the importance of your URLs. Search engines like Google place considerable weight on the structure of URLs when indexing its pages.

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

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

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

The link structure shown above is used by WordPress to find information inside its database. It doesn’t really mean anything to search engines or visitors, and it doesn’t help your site with on-site search engine optimization.

As the screenshot below shows, many WordPress site owners haven’t yet configured their sites to use permalinks …

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

To get greater 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 numbers and symbols.

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

To something with an SEO-friendly URL like this …

In this step-by-step tutorial, you will learn how to configure your WordPress permalinks to display posts with SEO-friendly URLs instead of the out-of-the-box linking structure and help every new post you add to your site or blog automatically get better indexing in Google.

Changing WordPress Permalinks

In your WordPress dashboard 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 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 …

(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/europe-travel/top-european-river-cruises

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=6345

(Using post name permalinks helps visitors understand what your content is about)

WordPress 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 gets published, four digits (e.g. ‘2010’)
• %monthnum% – The month the post gets published (e.g. ‘08’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘23’)
• %hour% – The hour your post is published (e.g. ‘22’)
• %minute% – The minute the post gets published (e.g. ‘13’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘52’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘3858’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted version of the post title. For example, if your post title is ”Ten Signs That You’re About To Get Fired From Your Job!”, the postname tag will convert this into “ten-signs-that-youre-about-to-get-fired-from-your-job” (all letters converted to lower case and no exclamation 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 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 choosing the ‘Custom Structure’ setting and using the /%postname%/ tag.

Optional Permalink Settings

If you need to set up custom structures for your tag and category pages here is where you would do this.

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

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

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

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

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

To something like this …

If you leave these fields blank WordPress uses the default settings.

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 Short, Descriptive Categories

To get the maximum SEO benefit from 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 plugin developer Joost de Valk, here are some things to consider if you are wondering whether you should add categories to your permalinks 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 add categories 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 or share 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 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 perfect permalink structure to use. Choose 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.

Avoid Setting Up URL Syntaxes That Time-Stamp Your Content

Another tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your site provides news or time-specific information, or there is a special reason why you need to date your content, it’s best to avoid choosing date-based permalinks when configuring your blog’s URLs.

(Avoid setting up permalinks that date your content)

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

What If My Site Already Has Lots Of Indexed Content?

Normally, it’s best to set up your site’s permalinks when you install a new WordPress site. This should be part of your website 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 absolutely something that needs to be done, as making changes to permalinks after your site has been going for a while can create SEO issues and loss of traffic.

301 Redirection

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

Maybe you started out using the default WordPress URL structure and now you would like to optimize your site better for search engines. Maybe your website or blog was configured to display post dates in your web address and now all of your posts are perceived as being outdated and you want to remove the date portion in your permalinks.

The best way to change your permalinks without affecting your site’s SEO in a negative way is to add ‘301 redirects’ to point all links that were set up using the old permalink syntax to page URLs using the new permalink syntax.

A code ‘301’ is interpreted by search engines as a link that has permanently been moved. 301 redirects are the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect visitors to new site destinations and avoid running into page errors if they click on an old link.

To create an effective permalink syntax 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 add a link redirection system to your do this using a WordPress redirection plugin like Simple 301 Redirects, or Redirection, or use the services of a professional to help you set up and redirect your permalinks correctly to avoid issues and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up URL redirections using plugins or get professional help)

Congratulations! Now you know about the built-in system WordPress uses to display SEO-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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