The Importance of Wordpress Permalinks

The WordPress permalinks structure of your website or blog is one of the most important things you need to know about. The URL that is generated via the permalink settings crucially effects how search engines rank your pages and/or posts. It takes minutes to set it up properly and the benefit far bigger than the time “wasted” on it.

Here’s an article for you to teach you how to set up the WordPress permalinks properly in and some examples how to make the most effective URLs for your pages!

Before I start telling you how and why is this all very important, first, let’s go to the WordPress Settings and check out what are our options there.

WordPress Permalink Settings

Wordpress Permalink Settings (click to enlarge)

Let’s head to the page where you need to set up your WordPress permalinks structure. Open up your site’s administration and go to Settings/Permalinks (right image). As you see, you have a couple of options there. You can leave the WordPress permalinks to default and have /p=1575 in the URL, change to date or day related permalinks or put up a numeric one.

What we need here is the last one: the Custom Structure. Let me explain why.

Google and all the major search engines keep the URL as a part of the ranking algorithm, checking keywords and density there. So, if you leave the WordPress permalinks type to any of the suggested ones (except the last one) you are actually more-less making a mistake. If your URL for the post is “http://mycoolblog.com/2010/4/4/p=4353/” what did you tell to the search engines? You told them that your site is “my”, “cool” (BTW, search engines do not actually think your site is cool if you write that in the URL, it only tells them it is related to the “cool” word) and “post” plus a bunch of numbers that noone cares about. So, this is bad. Let’s check out now how to properly set up the WordPress permalinks settings!

One Permalink Customization to Rule Them All!

At this point we shall look what WordPress offers us to set up a permalink structure that is custom and fits our needs from the aspect of human readability and Search Engine Optimization.

If you enlarged the previous image you probably noticed that the WordPress permalinks is set to custom, and has the “/%category%/%postname%/” in the field that is otherwise empty by default. What this actually means is this. You wrote a post about “growing chilly in your garden”, and that went to the “food” category. Good, so the post URL will be:

Home URL + / + categorie + / + growing chilly in your garden

what comes out as:

http://www.mycoolblog.com/food/growing-chilly-in-your-garden/

First, this is far more descriptive for human readers then having a bunch of numbers and p=68724. You actually TOLD the search engines what this post is about! It’s about food, growing, chilly, in, your and garden. As simple as that. WordPress will automatically add the categories and post titles to the URL, you only need to take care to give descriptive titles to your posts or pages.

Some people recommend the /%year%/%month%/%day%/%postname%/ WordPress permalinks structure, or the same with %categorie% added before the post-name. I agree that this structure is important for news type sites or if you want to apply for Google news – I think they will ask for a similar URL setup.

Here is the complete list of codes that WordPress supports for creating custom WordPress permalinks:

Some of the suggested %code-for-the-permalink-structure%s are not recommended by the good people over at WordPress.

So you can combine all sorts of styles with these codes. Once you set it up properly you will only need to choose the post categorie, tag, and give the article/post/page a proper slug:

Editing the slug post or page title in WordPress

Like shown on the image, and you are good to go!

Just set up the WordPress permalinks structure and the search engines will love you and then you can also start loving them back!