Wouldn’t it be great if you could just publish a new page on your site, and the following happened … just from your page URL:

• Potential visitors to your site could quickly glean what the post is about,
• Search engines would be able to discover your pages faster,
• Each piece of content added to your site would have its own unique identifier, making things easier to manage.

Well, this is what permalinks let you do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – Definition

A permalink is the permanent URL to your individual posts, categories and other taxonomies (a way to group things together) like archives.

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

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

Why Use Permalinks?

As you probably know, 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 the SEO aspect can be easily finetuned using excellent SEO plugins.

If you are looking to optimize the SEO aspect of your site, then you should not ignore the importance of its site’s URLs. Search engines like Google place considerable weight on the structure of URLs when indexing its content.

Permalinks can be used to make the 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 it’s best to use permalinks in WordPress.

By default, a WordPress installation uses a URL structure for your posts that isn’t very search engine friendly and looks like this …

The link structure shown above is used by WordPress to find information within its database. It does not mean anything to search engines or visitors, and it doesn’t help your website with on-site SEO.

As you can see from the image below taken directly from Google search results, many WordPress users have not configured their permalinks …

Although Google is still indexing the above sites, many site owners are missing out on additional SEO benefits.

To get the best possible SEO benefit from 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 characters.

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

To something like this …

By default, WordPress post URLs are not very search engine-friendly. This step-by-step tutorial explains how to configure your permalinks in WordPress to get better indexing in search engines like Google.

Setting Up Your WordPress Permalinks

From your WP main menu, click on Settings > Permalinks …

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

Common Settings – Permalinks

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 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/europe-travel/top-european-river-cruise-destinations

Instead of this …

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

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

Pretty Permalink 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. ‘2013’)
• %monthnum% – The month the post gets published (e.g. ‘03’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘24’)
• %hour% – The hour the post is published (e.g. ‘21’)
• %minute% – The minute the post gets published (e.g. ‘21’)
• %second% – The exact second your post is published (e.g. ‘48’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘7583’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted version of the 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 exclamation 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 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 choosing ‘Custom Structure’ and adding the /%postname%/ tag.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

Here you can set up custom structures for your tag and category archive pages.

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

• domain.com/category_base/category_name
• domain.com/tag_base/tag_name

For example, using “recipes” as your category base will display your category links as ‘http://domain.com/recipes/uncategorized/’.

So, if you add the following to your permalinks Optional > Category base settings section …

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

To something like this …

If you leave the 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 – Tips

Set Up Your Categories

To get the maximum 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 expert Joost de Valk, here are some things to consider if you are wondering whether you should add categories to your permalinks 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 categories 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 and reduce the SEO benefit.
• 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 adding category vs no category there is no perfect 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.

Avoid Date-Based Permalinks

Another great tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your goal is to run a news site or there is a special reason why you need to date your content, avoid selecting date-based permalink syntax when setting up your blog’s URLs.

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

Visitors 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 If My Blog Has Lots Of Content?

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

If your website is already established or your site already has a lot of content indexed in the search engines and you would like to change the permalink structure, make sure that this is something that absolutely needs doing, as making changes to permalinks after your site has been running for a while could create SEO issues and errors.

Use 301 Redirects

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

Maybe you started out using the default WordPress permalinks and now you want to improve your site’s SEO. Perhaps your website or blog was originally set up 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 URLs.

To modify your permalink structure without affecting your site’s SEO or rankings in a negative way you should use ‘301 redirects’ to point links set up using the old URL syntax to web addresses using the new syntax.

Search engines interpret a code ‘301’ as a link that has been permanently moved elsewhere. 301 redirects are the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect visitors to new website destinations and avoid running into ”page not found” errors if clicking on an old link.

To create an effective syntax change and avoid damaging your rankings, sending visitors to broken links, etc. you should install and set up 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 plugins 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 301 redirections using plugins or get professional assistance)

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

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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