Wouldn’t it be great if after publishing a new page on your WordPress website, the following could take place … just from your web address:

• Users could quickly tell what the post is about,
• Search engines would find your pages faster,
• Every single content item on your website or blog would have a unique identifier, making things 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 your individual WordPress posts, categories and other taxonomies (a way to group things together) like archives.

A permalink is the web address that others use to link to articles or sections of your site or the links you send in emails pointing to content items on your blog. Permalinks are often called “pretty” URLs.

Permalinks make the URL pointing to each post on your website permanent, hence a permalink.

Why Do You Need To Use Permalinks?

Hopefully, you are probably aware by now that, WordPress is one of the best CMS tools available when it comes to SEO.

WordPress is not only great for SEO out of the box, but there are SEO plugins you can install that can help to improve 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 your URLs. Search engines like Google tend to give special significance to the structure of URLs when indexing its content.

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

Now … let’s see 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 above link structure with a string query to find data within its database. It does not mean much to anyone, and it doesn’t help your site with on-site search engine optimization.

As the screenshot below shows, many WordPress site owners haven’t set up their permalinks …

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

To get the most SEO benefit out of using and improve your site’s rankings, you will want to make sure to set up 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 and archived posts, so your content can go from this …

To something with an SEO-friendly URL like this …

Out of the box, WordPress post URLs are not very search engine-friendly. In this step-by-step tutorial, you will learn how to configure the Permalinks section of your WordPress site to display posts using search engine-friendly URLs.

Setting Up WordPress Permalinks

From your WP main menu, 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 a search engine friendly URL instead for our posts. To do this, we will 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 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/travel-tips/how-to-save-money-on-cruise-travel

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=8024

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

Search Engine-Friendly Tags

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

• %year% – The year the post gets published, displayed as four digits (e.g. ‘2012’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘08’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘07’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘09’)
• %minute% – The minute the post is published (e.g. ‘49’)
• %second% – The exact second your post is published (e.g. ‘20’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘9449’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of your post title. For example, if your post title is “Top Five Budget Travel Tips!”, the postname tag will convert this into “top-five-budget-travel-tips” (all lower case letters and exclamation marks removed) in the URL. Tip: You can edit the wording in your post title 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 choosing ‘Custom Structure’ and adding the /%postname%/ tag.

Optional Permalink Settings

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

This changes the ‘base’ category or tag URLs using the following structure:

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

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

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

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

To this …

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

Remember to save your changes when 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

Use Descriptive Categories

To get the best possible benefit out of using Permalinks, it’s important 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 and author of the WordPress SEO plugin Joost de Valk, here are a few things to keep in mind if you are wondering whether you should add categories to your permalinks or not:

• If your domain is short and your category is short and descriptive (e.g. adds a relevant keyword or keyword phrase to your URL), 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 share or copy and decrease 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 ”better” permalink structure to use. Use a permalink structure you think will suit your needs best. Many SEO experts and webmasters recommend making your post URLs short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We cover WordPress categories in other articles.

Avoid Setting Up Permalink Syntaxes That Date Your Posts

Another great tip from Joost de Valk is that unless you plan to run a news blog or you have a special reason to add dates to your URLs, avoid using date-based permalink syntax when setting up your blog’s URLs.

(Avoid using permalinks that time-stamp your content)

Although setting up URL structures that time-stamp your posts 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 what they are searching for.

Changing Your Permalink Structure In An Established Blog

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

If your website or blog has been running for a while or your site already has a lot of posts indexed in the search engines and you would like to change the permalink structure, make sure that this is really necessary, as making changes to permalinks after your site has been up and running for a while could create SEO issues and loss of traffic.

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 when you started out, your site used 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 web address and now all of your posts are perceived as being out-of-date and you want to remove the date portion in the URLs.

To edit your permalinks without affecting your site’s SEO or rankings in a negative way you will need to add ‘301 redirections’ to reassign links that use the old permalink syntax to post URLs using the new permalinks syntax.

A code ‘301’ is interpreted by search engines as a link that has permanently relocated. 301 redirects are the most efficient and search engine friendly way to redirect visitors to new web page destinations and avoid running into page errors when following an old link.

To effectively change your permalink syntax and avoid damaging your search rankings, sending visitors to broken links, etc. you will need to configure a redirection system before changing the permalink structure of your site.

You can WordPress 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 any problems and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up 301 redirects using a WordPress redirection plugin or use the services of a professional)

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, see the official WordPress documentation below:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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