Wouldn’t it be great if you could simply publish a new post on your website or blog, and the following happened … just from your web address:

• Visitors could easily glean what your page is about,
• Search engines would easily find your posts and correctly classify their content to improve your search rankings,
• Each piece of content on your website or blog would have its own 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 – What Are They?

Permalinks are the permanent URLs to your individual WordPress posts, categories and other taxonomies (a way to organize things together) like archives.

A permalink is the web address that visitors and search engines will use to link to your posts or sections of your site or the links you send in emails pointing readers to your posts. Permalinks are often called “pretty” URLs.

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

Permalinks – Why Do We Need To Use Them?

Hopefully, you are probably aware that, WordPress is one of the best CMS tools 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 website, then you should not ignore the importance of your URLs. Google tends to pay special attention to the structure of URLs when indexing its pages.

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

Now … let’s turn our attention to the reason why it’s best to configure your permalinks in WordPress.

By default, a 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 with a string query to locate information inside your database. It doesn’t really mean anything to either search engines or visitors, and it doesn’t help your site with on-site search engine optimization.

As the screenshot below shows, many WordPress users haven’t yet set up their sites to use WordPress permalinks …

Although Google is clearly still indexing the above sites, these site owners are missing out on extra SEO benefits.

To get optimal 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 characters.

WordPress allows you to create a custom URL structure for your published posts, so your content 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 WordPress permalinks to help your content rank better in search engines like Google.

Setting Up WordPress Permalinks

In your WordPress dashboard 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 “pretty” permalinks instead for our posts. To do this, we need to specify a different Permalink structure than the 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 …

(Set up 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/cruise-holiday-bargains

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=2257

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

Using Permalink Tags In WordPress

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

• %year% – The year your post is published, four digits (e.g. ‘2011’)
• %monthnum% – The month your post is published (e.g. ‘03’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘06’)
• %hour% – The hour the post is published (e.g. ‘12’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘53’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘20’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘8964’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of the post title. For example, if the 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 lower case letters and punctuation marks removed) 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 the ‘Custom Structure’ setting and using the /%postname%/ tag.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

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

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

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

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

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

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

To something like this …

If you leave these fields blank WordPress uses the defaults.

Remember to save your changes when 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

Use Short, Descriptive Categories

To get maximum benefit from 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 Joost de Valk, here are some things to consider if you are wondering whether or not to add categories to your permalinks:

• If your category slug 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 share and decrease the SEO benefit.
• Do you plan to post content under only one category or multiple categories? If you are going 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 really is no perfect permalink structure to use. Use the permalink structure you think will suit your site best. Your web address should be short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We cover WordPress categories in another article.

Don’t Use Date Permalinks

Another great tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your site provides news, or there is a special reason why you need to create dated website URLs, avoid using date-based permalink options when configuring your site’s URLs.

(Avoid using permalinks that date your content)

Although setting up permalinks that time-stamp your posts may be considered better that using no permalinks at all from an SEO perspective, visitors are less likely to click on posts that are a couple of years old, even if the content is relevant to what they are searching for.

Changing Permalinks In Blog With Published 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 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 something that absolutely needs doing, as changing permalinks after your site has already been going for a while can create issues and loss of traffic.

301 Redirects

As you’ve seen in earlier screenshots, some website owners (or their web developers) are unaware of the permalinks feature of WordPress.

Maybe when you started out, your site used the default WordPress URL structure and now you want to optimize your site better for search engines. Maybe your website or blog was originally set up to display post dates in your URLs and now all of your posts are perceived as being out-of-date and you want to delete the date tags of your permalinks.

To modify your permalink structure without negatively impacting your site’s SEO or existing rankings you will need to use ‘301 redirections’ to reassign links set up using the old permalink structure to web addresses using the new permalink syntax.

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

To effectively change your syntax and avoid damaging your rankings, sending visitors to broken links, etc. you should install and set up your redirection system before changing 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 problems and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up 301 redirects using a WP plugin or get professional help)

Congratulations! Now you know how to set up your WordPress permalinks to display search engine-friendly URLs for your posts. For additional information on using Permalinks, refer to the official WordPress documentation below:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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