Wouldn’t it be great if you could add content to your site, and the following happened … just from your URL:

• Visitors could gain an understanding of what the post was about,
• Google would be able to find your posts faster,
• Every item of content you create on your website or blog would have its own unique identifier, 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 posts, categories and other taxonomies (a way to organize 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 emails pointing readers to a specific item of content on your blog. Some people also call permalinks “pretty” URLs.

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

Permalinks – Why Use Them?

As you have probably heard by now, WordPress is one of the best Content Management Systems you can use when it comes to publishing search optimized content.

WordPress is not only great for SEO out of the box, but the SEO aspect can be considerably improved with excellent SEO plugins.

If you are looking to optimize the SEO aspect of your site or blog, then you should not ignore the importance of your URLs. Google places considerable weight on the URL structure of a site.

Permalinks can be used to turn 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 take a look at 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 above link structure is used by WordPress to find data within your database. It doesn’t really help your website with on-site search engine optimization.

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

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

To get the best possible SEO benefit out of using WordPress and improve your site’s rankings, you should 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 allows you 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 with an SEO-friendly URL like this …

In this tutorial, you will learn how to configure the Permalinks section of your WordPress site to display your posts with search engine-friendly URLs instead of the default linking structure and help every new post you publish on your site or blog automatically get better indexing in search engines.

Setting Up Your WordPress Permalinks

In your WordPress main menu, 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 search engine friendly URLs instead for our posts. To do this, we will need to specify a different Permalink structure than the default one.

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

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=759

(Using post name permalinks helps readers understand what the post is about)

Search Engine-Friendly Tags

“Pretty” permalinks, or SEO-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. ‘2015’)
• %monthnum% – The month the post is published (e.g. ‘06’)
• %day% – The day the post gets published (e.g. ‘24’)
• %hour% – The hour your post is published (e.g. ‘23’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘28’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘52’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘2226’)
• %postname% – A sanitized 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 punctuation symbols removed) in the URL. Tip: You can edit the words 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 adding the /%postname%/ tag in the ‘Custom Structure’ setting.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

If you need to configure custom permalinks for your tag and category URLs you can do this in this section.

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

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

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

So, if you enter the following in 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 the optional settings fields blank WordPress uses the defaults.

Remember to save your changes when 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 – Tips

Categories

To get greater SEO benefit out of using Permalinks, remember to set up your WordPress Categories correctly. If you do not have any categories set up, adding a category tag to your permalink forces WordPress to use the default category (uncategorized).

According to WordPress SEO plugin developer Joost de Valk, here are some things to keep in mind if you are wondering whether you should add categories to your permalink structure or not:

• If your category is short and descriptive (e.g. uses a relevant keyword or keyword phrase), 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 copy and decrease the SEO benefit.
• 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 ”better” permalink structure to use. We recommend choosing the permalink structure you think will suit your site best and that will make your site’s web addresses short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We cover WordPress categories in another tutorial.

Make Your Content Timeless

Another useful tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your aim is to run a news blog or you have any special reason to add dates to your post URLs, avoid selecting date-based permalink settings when configuring your blog’s URLs.

(Avoid setting up permalinks that date your posts)

Although using permalinks that time-stamp your posts is 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 the answers they are searching for.

What About An Established Blog?

Normally, your site’s permalinks should be set up when you create a new WordPress site. 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 making changes to permalinks after your site has already been going for a while can create issues and loss of traffic.

Use 301 Redirection

As you’ve seen in earlier screenshots, many WordPress users (or whoever set up their site) are completely unaware of the SEO-friendly URLs feature of WordPress.

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

To modify your permalinks without impacting your site’s SEO or rankings in a negative way you should add ‘301 redirections’ to reassign links that were set up using the previous URL structure to web URLs that use the new structure.

Search engines interpret a ’301′ code as a link that has permanently been relocated. 301 redirection is the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect visitors to new web page destinations and avoid running into page errors if following an old link.

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

You can site using WP redirection 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 redirects using plugins 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, see the official WordPress documentation below:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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