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

• Readers could quickly understand what the content was about,
• Google would be able to easily discover your posts and correctly classify their content to improve your search rankings,
• Every single post you create on 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

What’s A Permalink?

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 URL that others use to link to posts or sections of your site or the links you send in an email pointing to a specific post on your blog. Permalinks are often referred to as “pretty” URLs.

Permalinks make the URL pointing to each post on your site permanent, hence a perma-link.

Permalinks – Why Do We Need To Use Them?

Hopefully, by now you probably know that, WordPress is one of the best CMS tools available when it comes to publishing search engines optimized content.

WordPress is not only well optimized straight out of the box, but its SEO aspect can be considerably fine tuned with excellent SEO plugins.

If you are looking to optimize the SEO aspect of your website, then you cannot ignore the importance of its site’s 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 memorable and more “search engine friendly” URLs. Permalinks can also improve the aesthetics, usability, and forward-compatibility of your links.

Now … let’s take a look at why it’s best to set up permalinks if 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 …

The above link structure is used by WordPress to find information within its database. It does not help your website with on-site search engine optimization.

As the screenshot below shows, many site owners haven’t yet configured their permalinks …

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

To get the best possible SEO benefit out of using WordPress 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 numbers and symbols.

WordPress lets you create a custom URL structure for your published posts, so your content can 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 set up your WP permalinks to display your posts using SEO-friendly URLs.

Changing WordPress Permalinks

From your WP administration 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 search engine friendly URLs instead for our posts. To do this, we need to specify a different Permalink structure than the default.

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

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=686

(Using permalinks helps readers and search engines understand what the content 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 the post is published, four digits (e.g. ‘2012’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘04’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘14’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘05’)
• %minute% – The minute the post gets published (e.g. ‘49’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘09’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘6788’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted version of your 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 characters converted to lower case and exclamation symbols deleted) in the URL. Tip: You can 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 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 choosing the ‘Custom Structure’ setting and using the /%postname%/ tag.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

If you need to configure custom permalinks for your tag and category page URLs here is where you would do this.

You can change 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 “news” as your category base would display your category links as ‘http://domain.com/news/uncategorized/’.

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

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

To something like this …

If you leave these fields blank the defaults will be used.

Remember to save any 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

Use Short, Descriptive Categories

To get the best possible 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 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 is short and descriptive (e.g. uses a relevant keyword or keyword phrase), 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 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 ”better” permalink structure to use. Choose the permalink structure you think will suit your site 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 tutorials.

Avoid Setting Up Permalink Syntaxes That Time-Stamp Your Posts

Another useful tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your goal is to run a news website or there is a special reason why you need to add dates to your URLs, it’s best to avoid using date-based permalinks when setting up your URLs.

(Avoid setting up URL structures that date your posts)

Although using URL structures that time-stamp your content may be considered better that using no permalinks at all from an SEO perspective, 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 Blogs With Published Posts?

Normally, your site’s permalinks should be set up when you perform a new WordPress installation. 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 want to change the permalink structure, make sure that this is something that absolutely needs doing, as doing so can create issues and loss of traffic.

301 Redirects

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

Maybe when you started out, your site used the default WordPress URL structure and now you would like to improve your SEO. Perhaps your site was configured to display post dates in your URLs and now all of your content is perceived as being out-of-date and you want to remove the date portion in your permalinks.

The best way to change your permalink structure without impacting your site’s SEO or rankings in a negative way is to add ‘301 redirections’ to point all links set up using the previous permalink syntax to destinations that use the new structure.

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

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

You can site or blog using WordPress plugins like Simple 301 Redirects, or Redirection, or use the services of 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 for your changed URLs using a WP redirection plugin or get professional assistance)

Congratulations! Now you know how to set up your WordPress site or blog permalinks to display SEO-friendly URLs for your posts. For additional information on using Permalinks, see the official WordPress documentation below:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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