Wouldn’t it be great if you could add new content to your WordPress website or blog, and the following would then happen … just from your page address:

• Potential site visitors could glean what your page is about,
• Google could easily discover your post and correctly classify the content for better search rankings,
• Every post on your website or blog would have a unique identifier, making your site easier to manage.

Well, this is what WordPress permalinks let you do!

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 URL that visitors and search engines use to link to articles or sections of your site or the links you send in emails pointing to posts on your site. Some people also call permalinks “pretty” URLs.

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

Permalinks – Why Do You Need To Use Them?

As you probably know, WordPress is one of the best Content Management Systems you can use when it comes to SEO.

WordPress is not only great for SEO out of the box, but its SEO aspect can be considerably finetuned with SEO plugins.

If you are looking to optimize the SEO aspect of your website, then you cannot ignore the importance of its URLs. Google tends to pay special attention to the URL structure of a site.

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

Now … let’s review why it’s best to use permalinks in WordPress.

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

WordPress uses the above link structure with a string query to locate information inside its database. It does not help your site with on-site search engine optimization.

As the screenshot image below shows, many site owners haven’t set up their sites to use permalinks …

Although Google is still indexing the above sites, they are potentially missing out on additional SEO benefits.

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

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

To something like this …

Out of the box, WordPress URLs are not very search engine-friendly. In this step-by-step tutorial, you will learn how to configure your permalinks in WordPress to display posts with SEO-friendly URLs.

How To Set Up WordPress Permalinks

From your WordPress main menu, select 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 a “pretty” permalink instead for our posts. To do this, we will 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/river-cruises/top-european-cruise-destinations

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=4504

(Using post name permalinks helps visitors and search engines understand what your page is about)

Search Engine-Friendly Tags

“Pretty” URLs, or search engine-friendly URLs, are created by adding one or more ‘tags’ in the Custom Structure field:

• %year% – The year of the post, four digits (e.g. ‘2010’)
• %monthnum% – The month the post is published (e.g. ‘10’)
• %day% – The day your post gets published (e.g. ‘06’)
• %hour% – The hour your post gets published (e.g. ‘17’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘52’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘09’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘6612’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted version of the post title. For example, if your post title is ”The Five Don’ts Of DIY Home Repair!”, the postname tag will convert this into “the-five-donts-of-diy-home-repair” (all lower case characters and exclamation symbols removed) in the URL. Tip: You can always edit this text 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 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 adding the /%postname%/ tag.

Optional Permalink Settings

If you need to configure custom permalinks for your tag and category 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 make your category links display 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 this …

If you leave the optional settings fields blank the default settings 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 Information

Use Short, Descriptive Categories

To get the best possible 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 points to keep in mind if you are wondering whether or not to add categories to your permalinks:

• If your domain is short and your category name 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 copy and decrease 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.

Ultimately, when it comes to category vs no category there really is no perfect permalink structure to use. Choose a permalink structure that you think will suit your needs best. Your post URLs should be short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We provide detailed information about WordPress categories in other tutorials.

Create Timeless Posts

Another great tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your website is a news site or you have any special reason to create dated website addresses, it’s best to avoid using date-based permalink settings when setting up your URLs.

(Avoid setting up URL structures that time-stamp your content)

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

What About An Established Blog?

Normally, it’s best to configure your permalinks when you first install WordPress. This should be part of your website planning process.

If your website is already established 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 running for a while could create issues and loss of traffic.

301 Redirection

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

Maybe you started out using the default WordPress URL structure and now you want to improve your site’s SEO. Maybe your website was configured to display post dates in your web address and now all of your posts are perceived as being out-of-date and you want to remove the date portion in your permalinks.

To change your permalink structure without negatively affecting your site’s SEO or rankings you will need to add ‘301 redirects’ to point links set up using the old permalinks syntax to destinations that use the new permalinks structure.

Search engines interpret a ’301′ code as a link that has permanently moved. 301 redirection is the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect visitors to new site destinations and avoid running into page errors when they click on an old link.

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

You can add a link redirection system to your 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 any issues and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up 301 redirections using plugins or get professional help)

Congratulations! Now you know how to set up your WordPress permalinks to display SEO-friendly URLs for your posts. To learn more about using Permalinks, see the official WordPress documentation below:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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