Wouldn’t it be great if you could publish new content on your WordPress website, and the following took place … all from your page address:

• Readers could quickly tell what your post was about,
• Google could easily find your page and correctly index the content to improve your search rankings,
• Every single post added to your website or blog would have its own unique ID, making your content easier to manage.

Well, with WordPress permalinks this can easily be done!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – What Are They?

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

A permalink is the web address that others use to link to your posts or sections of your site or the links you send in emails pointing readers to content items on your site. Some people also call permalinks “pretty” URLs.

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

Permalinks – Why Use Them?

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

WordPress is not only well optimized right out of the box, but its SEO aspect can be further enhanced with SEO plugins.

If you focus on the SEO aspect of your site or blog, 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 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 aesthetics, usability, and forward-compatibility of your links.

Now … let’s take a look at why you may need to configure your permalinks when publishing content in WordPress.

By default, a WordPress installation uses a non-search engine friendly link-naming structure for your posts that looks like this …

WordPress uses the link structure with a string query shown above to locate information within your database. It does not help your website with on-site search engine optimization.

As you can see from the screenshot image below, many site owners haven’t yet configured their permalinks to publish search optimized content online …

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

To get the best SEO benefit from using 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 numbers and symbols.

WordPress lets you create a custom URL structure for your published and archived posts, so your pages can easily 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 your WordPress permalinks to display posts with search engine-friendly URLs instead of the out-of-the-box linking structure and help every new post you publish on your site automatically get better indexing results in search engines like Google.

Setting Up Your WordPress Permalinks

In your WP administration 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 a “pretty” permalink instead for our posts. To do this, we will need to specify a different Permalink structure than the default.

Common Permalink Settings

In the Common Settings section, select Custom Structure, then add one or more ‘tags’ (see below) to create SEO-friendly URLs …

(Configure your permalink settings to create search engine-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/cruise-travel/how-to-save-money-on-cruise-travel

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=840

(Using permalinks helps readers and search engines understand what your page 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 your post is published, four digits (e.g. ‘2011’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘01’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘20’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘12’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘08’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘14’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘6051’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of the post title. For example, if your 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 characters converted to lower case and no exclamation symbols) 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 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 sanitized 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 ‘Custom Structure’.

Optional Permalink Settings

If you need to configure custom permalinks for your category and tag pages here is where you would do this.

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

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

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

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

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

To this …

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

Remember to save any changes after 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 – Additional Notes

Set Up Your Categories

To get the maximum benefit out of using Permalinks, remember 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 keep in mind if you are wondering whether you should add categories to your permalink structure or not:

• If your domain is short and your category slug is short and descriptive (e.g. uses a relevant keyword or keyword phrase), 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 or share and decrease 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 it’s recommended that you do not use the category tag in your permalink structure.

Ultimately, when it comes to category vs no category there really is no ”better” permalink structure to use. We recommend choosing the permalink structure you think will suit your needs best and that will make your web address short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We cover WordPress categories in another tutorial.

Avoid Time-Specific Permalinks

Another great tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your site is a news site or there is a special reason why you need to date your site’s content, it’s best to avoid choosing date-based permalink options when setting up your URLs.

(Avoid setting up URL structures that time-stamp your posts)

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.

What If My Site Already Has Lots Of Content?

Normally, your site’s permalinks should be set up when you install a new WordPress site. This should be part of your site planning process.

If your site is already established or your site already has many posts indexed in the search engines and you want to change the permalink structure, make sure that this is really necessary, as changing permalinks after your site has already been up and running for a while can create issues and loss of traffic.

Add 301 Redirection

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

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

The best way to change your permalinks without negatively impacting your site’s SEO or rankings is to use ‘301 redirects’ to point all links that use the previous permalinks structure to web URLs using the new permalink structure.

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

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

You can WP site or blog 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 issues and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up 301 redirections using a WP plugin or get professional assistance)

Congratulations! Now you know how to set up your site’s permalinks to display SEO-friendly URLs for your posts and improve your search results. For additional information on using Permalinks, refer to the official WordPress documentation here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

***