Wouldn’t it be great if you could just add a new page to your website or blog, and the following would then happen … all from your page address:

• Visitors could easily assess what your content was about,
• Search engines would be able to easily discover your pages and correctly classify their content for better search results,
• Every post on your website or blog would have its own unique identifier, making your content easier to manage.

Well, this is what permalinks let you do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – Definition

Permalinks are the permanent URLs to an individual post, category, or other taxonomy (a way to organize things together) like archives.

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

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

Why Use Permalinks?

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

WordPress is not only well optimized straight out of the box, but there are excellent SEO plugins you can use that can further help to fine tuned its SEO aspect.

If you focus on the SEO aspect of your site, then you cannot ignore the importance of its site’s URLs. Google places considerable weight on the structure of a site’s URLs when indexing pages.

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

Now … let’s review why it’s best to set up permalinks in WordPress.

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

WordPress uses the above link structure to locate data within its database. It doesn’t really mean much to anyone, and it doesn’t help your website with on-site search engine optimization.

As you can see from the screenshot image below, many site owners haven’t configured their sites to use permalinks …

Although Google is still indexing the above sites, the owners of these sites are potentially missing out on additional SEO benefits.

To get the best SEO benefit from using WordPress and improve your site’s rankings, you should set up your permalinks structure to make it more search engine-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 easily go from something that is non-SEO friendly like this …

To something like this …

Out of the box, WordPress post URLs are not very SEO-friendly. This step-by-step tutorial shows you how to configure the Permalinks section of your WordPress site to display your posts with search engine-friendly URLs.

Configuring WordPress Permalinks

Log into your WordPress dashboard and select 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 will 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 SEO-friendly URLs …

(Change 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/travel-deals/river-cruise-holiday-deals

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=6557

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

WordPress Permalink 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. ‘2012’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘05’)
• %day% – The day the post gets published (e.g. ‘15’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘07’)
• %minute% – The minute your post is published (e.g. ‘06’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘39’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘1948’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted version of the post title. For example, if the post title is ”The Five Don’ts Of DIY Home Repair!”, the postname tag will convert this into “the-five-donts-of-diy-home-repair” (all lower case letters and exclamation marks deleted) 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 adding the /%postname%/ tag in the ‘Custom Structure’ option.

Optional Permalink Settings

This section lets you set up custom structures for your category and tag archive pages.

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/uncategorized/’.

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

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

To this …

If you leave the fields blank WordPress uses the defaults.

Remember to save any changes when 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

Set Up Categories

To get the greatest benefit from using Permalinks, it’s important 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 expert Joost de Valk, here are some points to consider if you are wondering whether or not to add categories to your permalinks:

• If your category name 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 copy 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 it’s recommended that you do not use the category tag in your permalink structure.

Ultimately, when it comes to using 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 web address short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We provide more information about WordPress categories in other articles.

Avoid Using Permalink Syntaxes That Date Your Content

Another useful tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your website is a news blog or there is a special reason why you need to add dates to your post URLs, avoid choosing date-based permalink settings for your site’s URLs.

(Avoid setting up URL structures 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 what they are searching for.

What If My Site Has Content?

Normally, it’s best to set up your site’s permalinks when you first install WordPress. This should be part of your website planning process.

If your website or blog is already established or your site already has many posts 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 up and running for a while could create issues and loss of traffic.

301 Redirection

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

Maybe you started out using the default WordPress URL structure and now you want to improve your site’s SEO. Perhaps your site was originally set up to display post dates in your web address and now all of your posts are showing as being old and you want to delete the date tags of your URLs.

To change your permalink structure without negatively affecting your site’s SEO or rankings you should add ‘301 redirects’ to reassign all links using the old permalink structure to post URLs that use the new permalinks structure.

A ’301′ code is interpreted by search engines as a link that has permanently been moved to another destination. 301 redirection is the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect users to new site destinations and avoid ‘404’ (Page not found) errors when following an old link.

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

You can WP site using redirection plugins like Simple 301 Redirects, or Redirection, or get a professional to help you set up and redirect your permalinks correctly to avoid any issues and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up 301 redirections using redirection plugins or get professional help)

Congratulations! Now you know how to configure your site’s permalinks to display search engine-friendly URLs for your posts and improve your search search rankings. To learn more about using Permalinks, refer to the WordPress codex here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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