Wouldn’t it be great if you could publish a new page on your website, and the following would then happen … all from your page URL:

• Potential site visitors could easily tell what the page was about,
• Search engines could easily find your pages and correctly index their content for better search rankings,
• Every piece of content added to your website would have its own unique ID, making things easier to manage.

Well, this is what a permalink lets you do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – What Are They?

Permalinks are the permanent URLs to an individual WordPress 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 posts or sections of your site or the links you send in an email pointing to a particular post on your site. Permalinks are often called “pretty” URLs.

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

Why Use Permalinks?

Hopefully, you are probably aware by now that, WordPress is one of the best CMS tools you can use when it comes to SEO.

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

If you focus on the SEO aspect of your website, then you should not ignore the importance of its site’s URLs. Search engines like Google place considerable weight on the structure of a site’s URLs when indexing its site 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 usability, aesthetics, and forward-compatibility of your links.

Now … let’s take a look at the reason why it’s best to set up permalinks in WordPress.

By default, a WordPress installation uses a URL 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 within your database. It does not mean anything to either visitors or search engines, and it doesn’t help your website with on-site search engine optimization.

As the screenshot taken from Google search listings below shows, many WordPress users have not yet configured their sites to use WordPress permalinks …

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

To get the maximum SEO benefit from using and improve your site’s rankings, you will want to make sure to configure your permalinks structure to make it more search engine-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 posts, so your content can go from this …

To this …

Out of the box, WordPress URLs are not very search engine-friendly. This step-by-step tutorial explains how to configure your WP permalinks to get better indexing results in search engines like Google.

How To Configure WordPress Permalinks

From your WordPress main menu, 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 a “pretty” permalink instead for our posts. To do this, we need to specify a different Permalink structure than the one set by default.

Common Settings

In the Common Settings section, select Custom Structure, then add one or more ‘tags’ (see below) to create SEO-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/travel-europe/river-cruise-holiday-deals

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=2498

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

Pretty Permalink Tags

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

• %year% – The year of the post, four digits (e.g. ‘2013’)
• %monthnum% – The month your post is published (e.g. ‘10’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘23’)
• %hour% – The hour your post gets published (e.g. ‘08’)
• %minute% – The minute your post gets published (e.g. ‘18’)
• %second% – The exact second the post gets published (e.g. ‘52’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘8669’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted version of the post title. For example, if your post title is ”It Ain’t Worth Doin’ No More!”, the postname tag will convert this into “it-aint-worth-doin-no-more” (all lower case letters and punctuation symbols deleted) 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 selecting ‘Custom Structure’ and using the /%postname%/ tag.

Optional Permalink Settings

This section lets you configure custom structures for your tag and category page URLs.

This changes 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 will make your category links display as ‘http://domain.com/news/uncategorized/’.

So, if you make the following change in your permalinks Optional > Category base settings field …

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

To something like this …

If you leave the optional settings fields blank the default settings will be used.

Remember to save any 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

Categories

To get the maximum benefit from 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 expert Joost de Valk, here are a few things to consider if you are wondering whether or not to add categories to your permalink structure:

• If your category slug is short and descriptive (e.g. adds a relevant keyword or keyword phrase to your URL), you may want to use categories in 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 reduce 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 we recommend not using the category tag in your permalink structure.

Ultimately, when it comes to adding category vs no category there really is no ideal permalink structure to use. Use the permalink structure you think will suit your needs best. Many SEO experts and webmasters recommend making your post URLs short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We provide detailed information about WordPress categories in another tutorial.

Don’t Use Date Permalinks

Another great tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your site is a news blog or you have any special reason to add dates to your URLs, avoid selecting date-based permalinks when setting up your blog’s URLs.

(Avoid setting up permalinks that time-stamp your content)

Although using URL structures that time-stamp your posts is better that using no permalinks at all from an SEO point-of-view, 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 Site With Published Posts

Normally, it’s best to set up your site’s permalinks 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 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 really necessary, as changing permalinks after your site has been going for a while could create SEO issues and errors.

Add 301 Redirects

As you’ve seen in earlier screenshots, many WordPress users (or their web developers) seem to be unaware of the SEO-friendly URLs feature of WordPress.

Maybe when you started, your site used the default WordPress permalinks and now you want to improve your site’s SEO. Perhaps your site was originally set up to display post dates in your URLs and now all of your posts are showing as being two or three years old and you want to remove the date portion in the permalinks.

The best way to modify your permalink structure without negatively affecting your site’s SEO or existing rankings is to use ‘301 redirections’ to reassign links using the previous URL syntax to post URLs that use the new permalink structure.

Search engines interpret a ’301′ code as a link that has permanently moved to another destination. 301 redirects are the most efficient and search engine friendly way to redirect users to new website destinations and avoid running into page errors when they click on an old link.

To create an effective permalink syntax change and avoid damaging your search rankings, sending visitors to error pages, etc. you will need to set up a redirection system before changing the permalink structure of your site.

You can WordPress 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 problems and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up URL redirections using redirection plugins or use the services of a professional)

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

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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