Wouldn’t it be great if after publishing a new post on your WordPress website or blog, the following happened … all from your post address:

• Potential site visitors could quickly tell what the content is about,
• Google would discover your pages faster,
• Every single item of content you create on your website or blog would have its own unique identifier, making things easier to manage.

Well, with WordPress 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 people and search engines use to link to your posts or sections of your site or the links you send in an email pointing to your posts. Some people also call permalinks “pretty” URLs.

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

Why Do You Need To Use Permalinks?

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

WordPress is not only well optimized straight out of the box, but there are excellent SEO plugins you can install that will help to fine tuned its SEO aspect considerably.

If you focus on the SEO aspect of your site or blog, then you should not ignore the importance of its URLs. Search engines like Google tend to pay special attention to the URL structure of your site.

Permalinks can be used to turn 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 turn our attention to the reason why it’s best to configure your 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 …

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

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

Although these sites are still getting their content indexed on search engines, many site owners are missing out on additional SEO benefits.

To get the best possible SEO benefit out of using and improve your site’s rankings, you will want to make sure to configure your permalinks structure to make it more SEO-friendly by displaying relevant keywords in your URL, instead of meaningless numbers and symbols.

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

To this …

By default, WordPress URLs are not very SEO-friendly. This tutorial shows you how to configure the Permalinks section of your WordPress site to display posts with search engine-friendly URLs.

Changing Your WordPress Permalinks

Log into your WP admin and click on Settings > Permalinks …

This brings 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 search engine friendly URLs instead for our posts. To do this, we will need to specify a different Permalink structure than the one set by default.

Common Settings – Permalinks

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 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/travel-tips/how-to-save-money-on-cruise-travel

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=4693

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

How To Use Permalink 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, displayed as four digits (e.g. ‘2011’)
• %monthnum% – The month the post gets published (e.g. ‘05’)
• %day% – The day your post is published (e.g. ‘12’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘15’)
• %minute% – The minute your post gets published (e.g. ‘12’)
• %second% – The exact second your post gets published (e.g. ‘14’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘1875’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of your post title. For example, if your 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 always edit this wording in the post slug field on the Add/Edit Post/Page screens.
• %category% – A sanitized 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 adding the /%postname%/ tag in ‘Custom Structure’.

Optional Permalink Settings

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

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

• 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 field …

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

To something like this …

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

Remember to save your changes after you have 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 Info

Set Up Your Categories

To get the maximum SEO benefit from using Permalinks, it’s important 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 a few points to keep in mind if you are wondering whether you should add categories to your permalink structure or not:

• If your domain is short and your category name 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 or share 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.

Ultimately, when it comes to using category vs no category there is no ideal permalink structure to use. We recommend choosing the permalink structure you think will suit your site best and that will make your web address short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We cover WordPress categories in another tutorial.

Don’t Use Date Permalinks

Another great tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your website provides news or time-specific information, or you have a special reason to create dated website URLs, avoid choosing date-based permalink syntax when setting up your site’s URLs.

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

Although using URL structures that time-stamp your content is better that using no permalinks at all from an SEO aspect, people 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 If My Site Already Has Indexed Content?

Normally, it’s best to configure your site’s permalinks when you first install WordPress. 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 would like to change the permalink structure, make sure that this is absolutely necessary, as making changes to permalinks after your site has been going for a while could create issues and errors.

Add 301 Redirects

As you’ve seen in earlier screenshots, some WordPress site owners (or their web developers) seem to be unaware of the SEO-friendly URLs feature of WordPress.

Maybe when you started out, your site used the default WordPress permalinks and now you want to improve your SEO. Perhaps your website or blog was configured to display post dates in your URLs and now all of your content is showing as being 2-3 years old and you want to remove the date tags of the permalinks.

The best way to edit your permalink structure without impacting your site’s SEO in a negative way is to use ‘301 redirections’ to point all links that use the old URL structure to web addresses using the new permalink syntax.

A code ‘301’ is interpreted by search engines as a link that has been permanently moved. 301 redirection is the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect visitors to new site destinations and avoid ”page not found” errors when following an old link.

To create an effective permalink syntax change and avoid damaging your rankings, sending visitors to error pages, etc. you should 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 get a professional to assist you with setting up and redirecting your permalinks correctly to avoid problems and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up 301 redirects using plugins or get professional assistance)

Congratulations! Now you know how to change your blog’s permalinks to display search engine-friendly URLs for your posts. For additional information on using Permalinks, refer to the WordPress codex here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

***