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

• Potential visitors could easily understand what your content was about,
• Google could find your posts faster,
• Every single post created on your site would have a unique ID, making your content easier to manage.

Well, with permalinks you can!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalink – What Is It?

A permalink is the permanent URL to an individual post, category, or other taxonomy (a way to organize things together) like archives.

A permalink is the web address that other people use to link to posts or sections of your site or the links you send in emails pointing readers to a particular post on your site. Permalinks are often called “pretty” URLs.

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

Permalinks – Why Do We Need To Use Them?

As you have probably heard by now, WordPress is one of the best CMS applications 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 easily finetuned with SEO plugins.

If you focus on the SEO aspect of your site, then you cannot ignore the importance of its URLs. Search engines like Google place considerable weight on the URL structure of a site.

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

Now … let’s see why it’s best to use permalinks if publishing content in WordPress.

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

The above link structure is used by WordPress to find data inside its database. It doesn’t really mean much to anyone, and it doesn’t help your site with on-site SEO.

As you can see from the image below, many site owners haven’t yet set up their permalinks to publish search optimized content online …

Although Google is clearly still indexing the above sites, the owners of these sites are missing out on additional SEO benefits.

To get more SEO benefit from using WordPress and improve your site’s traffic results, you should set up your permalinks structure to make it more search engine-friendly by displaying relevant keywords in your URL, instead of meaningless characters.

WordPress allows you to create a custom URL structure for your published posts, so your content can easily go from this …

To this …

Out of the box, WordPress post URLs are not very SEO-friendly. This step-by-step tutorial explains how to configure your permalinks in WordPress to display your posts using SEO-friendly URLs.

How To Change WordPress Permalinks

In your WordPress dashboard 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 search engine friendly URLs instead for our posts. To do this, we need to specify a different Permalink structure than the default.

Common Settings

In the Common Settings section, select Custom Structure, then add one or more ‘tags’ (see below) to create SEO-friendly URLs …

(Configure 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/cruise-holiday-deals

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=9008

(Using post name permalinks helps search engines and visitors understand what your post 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 is published, displayed as four digits (e.g. ‘2011’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘01’)
• %day% – The day the post is published (e.g. ‘25’)
• %hour% – The hour the post gets published (e.g. ‘23’)
• %minute% – The minute your post gets published (e.g. ‘17’)
• %second% – The exact second the post is published (e.g. ‘40’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘8621’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted version of your 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 punctuation symbols) in the URL. Tip: You can always 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 the ‘Custom Structure’ option and using the /%postname%/ tag.

Optional Permalink Settings

If you need to configure custom permalinks for your category and tag page URLs you can do this in this section.

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

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

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

To this …

If you leave the optional settings fields blank the defaults will be used.

Remember to save any 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 Information

Use Short, Descriptive Categories

To get the best SEO 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 some things to consider if you are wondering whether you should add categories to your permalink structure or not:

• If your domain is short and your category slug is short and descriptive (e.g. adds a relevant keyword or keyword phrase to your URL), you may want to add the category tag 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 share or copy and reduce the SEO benefit.
• If you are going to post content under multiple categories, then we recommend not using the category tag in your permalink structure.

Ultimately, when it comes to category vs no category there really is no ideal permalink structure to use. Choose the permalink structure that you think will suit your site best. SEO experts recommend making your web address short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We cover WordPress categories in other tutorials.

Create Timeless Posts

Another tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your aim is to run a news blog or there is a special reason why you need to create dated web addresses, it’s best to avoid using date-based permalink settings when setting up your site’s URLs.

(Avoid setting up permalinks that time-stamp your content)

Visitors are less likely to click on posts that are a couple of years old, even if the content is relevant to what they are searching for.

What About Established Blogs?

Normally, it’s best to configure your site’s permalinks when you create a new WordPress site. This should be part of your website 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 something that absolutely needs doing, as making changes to permalinks after your site has already been going for a while could create issues and errors.

Use 301 Redirects

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

Maybe when you started out, your site used the default WordPress permalinks and now you would like 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 perceived as being out-of-date and you want to remove the date tags in the URLs.

To edit your permalink structure without negatively affecting your site’s SEO or existing rankings you should use ‘301 redirects’ to reassign links that were set up using the old permalink structure to destinations using the new syntax.

A ’301′ code is interpreted by search engines as a link that has been permanently moved. 301 redirects are the most efficient and search engine friendly way to redirect visitors to new website destinations and avoid running into ‘404’ (Page not found) errors when following an old link.

To create an effective permalink structure change and avoid SEO problems, sending visitors to error pages, etc. you should configure your redirection system before changing the permalink structure of your site.

You can WP site or blog using redirection plugins 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 a 301 redirection system using redirection plugins or get professional assistance)

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. For additional information on using Permalinks, refer to the official WordPress documentation below:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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