Wouldn’t it be great if after publishing new content on your website, the following took place … all from your post URL:

• Users could quickly determine what the post is about,
• Search engines would easily find your page and correctly classify its content to improve your search results,
• Every single post on your website or blog would have a unique ID, making your content easier to manage.

Well, this is what WordPress permalinks let you do!

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 group things together) like archives.

A permalink is the web address that visitors and search engines use to link to articles or sections of your site or the links you send in an email pointing to content items on your site. Some people also refer to permalinks as “pretty” URLs.

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

Why Do You Need To Use Permalinks?

As you are probably aware, WordPress is one of the best CMS applications available when it comes to SEO.

WordPress is not only well optimized straight out of the box, but the SEO aspect can be easily enhanced with SEO plugins.

If you are looking to optimize the SEO aspect of your site or blog, then you cannot ignore the importance of its URLs. Search engines like Google tend to pay special attention to the structure of URLs when indexing content.

Permalinks can be used to turn links on your site into “prettier” and more “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 you should set up permalinks when publishing content in WordPress.

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

WordPress uses the above link structure to find information inside its database. It doesn’t really help your website with on-site SEO.

As the screenshot taken from Google search results below shows, many WordPress site owners are still using out-of-the-box settings when publishing their content …

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

To get the best possible SEO benefit out of using WordPress and improve your site’s traffic results, 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 characters.

WordPress offers the ability to create a custom URL structure for your published and archived posts, so your pages can go from something that is non-SEO friendly like 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 set up your permalinks in WordPress to display your posts using search engine-friendly URLs.

Configuring Your 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 “pretty” permalinks 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 …

(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-deals/romantic-cruise-holiday-bargains

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=2723

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

Creating SEO-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 the post is published, four digits (e.g. ‘2010’)
• %monthnum% – The month your post is published (e.g. ‘05’)
• %day% – The day the post is published (e.g. ‘26’)
• %hour% – The hour your post gets published (e.g. ‘10’)
• %minute% – The minute the post gets published (e.g. ‘56’)
• %second% – The exact second your post gets published (e.g. ‘37’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘7050’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of the post title. For example, if the 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 no exclamation symbols) in the URL. Tip: You can 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 ‘Custom Structure’ and adding the /%postname%/ tag.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

This section lets you set up custom structures for your category and tag archive page URLs.

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, changing your category base to “travel” will 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 section …

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

To something like this …

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

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 – Tips

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, WordPress will use the default category (uncategorized).

According to WordPress SEO plugin developer Joost de Valk, here are a few points to consider 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. uses a relevant keyword or keyword phrase), you may want to use the category tag 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 decrease the SEO benefit.
• If you plan to post content under multiple categories, then we recommend not using the category tag in your permalink structure.

Despite being the subject of intense debate in WordPress SEO circles, when it comes to adding category vs no category there is no ideal permalink structure to use. We recommend choosing the permalink structure you think will suit your needs best and that will make your post URLs short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We cover WordPress categories in other tutorials.

Don’t Use Date Permalinks

Another useful tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your site is a news site or you have a special reason to date your content, it’s best to avoid using date-based permalink options when setting up your site’s URLs.

(Avoid setting up permalinks that date your content)

Although using URL structures that time-stamp your posts may be considered better that using no permalinks at all from an SEO point-of-view, visitors are less likely to click on a post if it is several years old, even if the content is relevant to what they are searching for.

What About Established Sites?

Normally, your site’s permalinks should be configured when you first install WordPress. This should be part of your website planning process.

If your site is already established 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 really necessary, as changing permalinks after your site has already been going for a while could create issues and errors.

Add 301 Redirects

As you’ve seen in the above screenshots of actual search results, many WordPress site owners (or whoever set up their site) seem to be unaware of the permalinks feature of WordPress.

Maybe you started out using the default WordPress permalinks and now you want to optimize your site better for search engines. Perhaps your website was originally set up to display post dates in your web address and now all of your posts are showing as being old and you want to remove the date tags in the URLs.

To edit your URL structure without affecting your site’s SEO in a negative way you should use ‘301 redirections’ to reassign all links that were set up using the old URL syntax to destinations that use the new permalink structure.

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

To effectively change your syntax and avoid damaging your search rankings, sending visitors to broken links, etc. you should add a redirection system before messing with the permalink structure of your site.

You can WP site using a plugin like Simple 301 Redirects, or Redirection, or get a professional to help you set up and redirect your permalinks correctly to avoid problems and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up a 301 redirection system using a WP plugin or use the services of a professional)

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