Wouldn’t it be great if after publishing a new post on your website, the following could happen … just from your web address:

• Site readers could easily gain an understanding of what the content is about,
• Google could easily discover your post and correctly classify your content for better search rankings,
• Every single content item created on your website 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

What’s A Permalink?

A permalink is the permanent URL to your individual WordPress posts, categories and other taxonomies (a way to organize things together) like archives.

A permalink is the URL that others will use to link to your articles or sections of your site or the links you send in an email pointing to posts on your site. Permalinks are often called “pretty” URLs.

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

Why Do You Need To Use Permalinks?

As you probably know, WordPress is one of the best Content Management Systems available when it comes to publishing search optimized content.

WordPress is not only great for SEO out of the box, but there are excellent SEO plugins you can install that can help to fine tuned its SEO aspect further.

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

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

Now … let’s review the reason why you may need to use permalinks if publishing content in WordPress.

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

WordPress uses the link with a string query shown above to locate data inside your database. It doesn’t really mean anything to search engines or visitors, and it doesn’t help your website with on-site SEO.

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

Although these sites are getting their content indexed on search engines, the owners of these sites are potentially missing out on extra SEO benefits.

To get the best possible SEO benefit out of using and improve your site’s traffic results, 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 and archived posts, so your pages can easily go from this …

To this …

In this tutorial, you will learn how to configure your WordPress permalinks to display your posts with SEO-friendly URLs instead of the out-of-the-box linking structure and help every new post you add get better indexing results in search engines like Google.

Configuring WordPress Permalinks

Log into your WordPress dashboard and 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 Settings – Permalinks

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-tips/how-to-save-money-on-cruise-travel

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=5068

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

SEO-Friendly Tags

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

• %year% – The year the post is published, displayed as four digits (e.g. ‘2013’)
• %monthnum% – The month the post gets published (e.g. ‘07’)
• %day% – The day your post is published (e.g. ‘31’)
• %hour% – The hour your post gets published (e.g. ‘10’)
• %minute% – The minute the post gets published (e.g. ‘60’)
• %second% – The exact second your post is published (e.g. ‘29’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘9669’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted version of your 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 letters converted to lower case and removed punctuation symbols) in the URL. Tip: You can always edit the URL wording 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 choosing the ‘Custom Structure’ option and adding the /%postname%/ tag.

Optional Permalink Settings

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

You can change the ‘base’ tag or category URLs using the following structure:

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

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

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

Your ‘category archives’ page URL will change from 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

Use Short, Descriptive Categories

To get the optimal 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 expert and author of the WordPress SEO plugin Joost de Valk, here are a few points to keep in mind if you are wondering whether or not to add categories to your permalink structure:

• 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 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 share and reduce 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 we recommend not using the category tag in your permalink structure.

Ultimately, when it comes to using category vs no category there is no ideal permalink structure to use. Choose the permalink structure you think will suit your needs best. Your web address should be short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We provide detailed information about WordPress categories in another tutorial.

Avoid Setting Up Permalinks That Date Your Content

Another great tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your site provides news or time-specific information, or you have any special reason to create dated post URLs, it’s best to avoid choosing date-based permalink syntax for your blog’s URLs.

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

Visitors 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.

Changing Permalinks In Blog With Indexed Content

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

If your site is already established or you have a lot of content already 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 doing so could create SEO issues and loss of traffic.

Use 301 Redirects

As you’ve seen in earlier screenshots, many WordPress site owners (or their web developers) are completely unaware of the permalinks feature of WordPress.

Maybe you started out using the default WordPress URL structure and now you want to optimize your site better for search engines. Perhaps your website was configured 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 your permalinks.

The best way to modify your URL structure without affecting your site’s SEO or rankings in a negative way is to add ‘301 redirects’ to reassign all links that were set up using the old URL syntax to page URLs using the new permalink syntax.

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

To effectively change your permalink syntax and avoid damaging your search rankings, sending visitors to broken links, etc. you should install and set up a redirection system before changing the permalink structure of your site.

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

(Set up URL redirections using a WordPress redirection plugin or get professional help)

Congratulations! Now you know how to change your site’s permalinks to display search engine-friendly URLs for your posts. For additional information on using Permalinks, see the official WordPress documentation below:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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