Wouldn’t it be great if you could publish a new post on your website or blog, and the following happened … just from your post address:

• New visitors could easily tell what your content was about,
• Search engines could discover your posts faster,
• Every single piece of content created on your website or blog would have its own unique ID, making your content easier to manage.

Well, with WordPress permalinks this can easily be done!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – Definition

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

A permalink is the web address that others use to link to your articles or sections of your site or the links you send in emails pointing to your posts. Some people also call permalinks “pretty” URLs.

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

Permalinks – Why Do We Need To Use Them?

Hopefully, you are probably aware by now that, WordPress is one of the best CMS applications available when it comes to publishing search engines optimized content.

WordPress is not only great for SEO out of the box, but there are SEO plugins you can install that will help to fine tuned its SEO aspect further.

If you are looking to optimize the SEO aspect of your site or blog, then you should not ignore the importance of its URLs. Search engines like Google tend to give special significance to the URL structure of your site.

Permalinks can be used to make the 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 why you may need to set up permalinks in WordPress.

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

WordPress uses the above link structure with a string query to locate information within its database. It doesn’t really help your website with on-site SEO.

As the screenshot image taken from Google search listings below shows, many WordPress site owners have not yet set up their sites to use permalinks …

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

To get greater SEO benefit out of using 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 lets you create a custom URL structure for your published posts, so your pages can easily go from this …

To something with an SEO-friendly URL like this …

By default, WordPress URLs are not very search engine-friendly. This step-by-step tutorial shows you how to configure the Permalinks section of your WordPress site to help you get better indexing results in search engines like Google.

Setting Up Your WordPress Permalinks

Log into your WP admin and click on 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 will 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 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-travel/river-cruise-holiday-deals

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=985

(Using permalinks helps readers understand what your page is about)

Pretty 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 of the post, displayed as four digits (e.g. ‘2014’)
• %monthnum% – The month your post gets published (e.g. ‘01’)
• %day% – The day your post gets published (e.g. ‘22’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘05’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘07’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘34’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘9882’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of your post title. For example, if your post title is ”It Ain’t Worth Doin’ No More!”, the postname tag will convert this into “it-aint-worth-doin-no-more” (all lower case characters and exclamation marks deleted) in the URL. Tip: You can edit this text 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 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, using “travel” as your category base would display your category links as ‘http://domain.com/travel/category_name/’.

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

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

To this …

If you leave these fields blank WordPress uses the defaults.

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 – Additional Info

Use Descriptive Categories

To get the greatest benefit from using Permalinks, you will need 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 some points to consider if you are wondering whether or not to add categories to your permalinks:

• If your category is short and descriptive (e.g. uses a relevant keyword or keyword phrase), 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.
• 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.

Despite being the subject of intense debate in WordPress SEO circles, when it comes to category vs no category there really is no ideal permalink structure to use. Use the permalink structure you think will suit your needs best. Many SEO experts and webmasters recommend making your web address short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We cover WordPress categories in another article.

Create Timeless Posts

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

(Avoid setting up URL structures that date your content)

Although setting up permalinks that date your content may be considered better that using no permalinks at all from an SEO perspective, people are less likely to click on a post that is a couple of years old, even if the content is relevant to the answers they are searching for.

What About Changing Permalinks In Blogs With Indexed Posts?

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

If your website is already established or your site already has a lot of posts indexed in the search engines and you want to change the permalink structure, make sure that this is something that absolutely needs doing, as doing so could create SEO issues and errors.

Add 301 Redirects

As you’ve seen in the above screenshots of actual search results, many WordPress users (or whoever set up their site) are completely unaware of the search-friendly URLs feature of WordPress.

Maybe when you started out, your site used the default WordPress permalinks and now you want to improve your site’s SEO. Maybe your site was originally set up to display post dates in your URLs and now all of your content is perceived as being outdated and you want to delete the date tags in your URLs.

The best way to modify your permalink structure without affecting your site’s SEO or rankings in a negative way is to add ‘301 redirections’ to reassign all links that were set up using the previous permalink structure to URLs using the new permalinks structure.

Search engines interpret a ’301′ code as a link that has permanently relocated to another destination. 301 redirection is the most efficient and search engine friendly way to redirect visitors to new site destinations and avoid running into ‘404’ (Page not found) errors if following an old link.

To create an effective permalink syntax change and avoid SEO problems, sending visitors to broken links, etc. you should install and set up your redirection system before changing the permalink structure of your site.

You can WP site using a 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 problems and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up 301 redirects using redirection plugins or get professional help)

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