Wouldn’t it be great if you could just add a new page to your WordPress site, and the following took place … just from your post address:

• Site readers could quickly gain an understanding of what the content was about,
• Google would find your pages faster,
• Every single post added to your website would have a unique ID, making your site easier to manage.

Well, with permalinks you can easily do this!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – Definition

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 use to link to your articles or sections of your site or the links you send in emails pointing to your posts. Permalinks are also referred to as “pretty” URLs.

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

Permalinks – Why Do I Need To Use Them?

As you have probably heard by now, WordPress is one of the best CMS tools you can use when it comes to SEO.

WordPress is not only well optimized straight out of the box, but its SEO aspect can be easily finetuned with excellent SEO plugins.

If you are looking to optimize the SEO aspect of your site, then you cannot ignore the importance of your URLs. Google tends to pay special attention to the URL structure of your site.

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

Now … let’s see why it’s best to configure your 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 above link structure to find information inside its database. It doesn’t really mean much to anyone, and it doesn’t help your site with on-site SEO.

As you can see from the screenshot image below, many WordPress users are still using out-of-the-box permalink settings when publishing their content …

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

To get the maximum SEO benefit from using WordPress 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 gives you the ability to create a custom URL structure for your published posts, so your content can easily go from this …

To something with an SEO-friendly URL like this …

By default, WordPress post URLs are not very SEO-friendly. This tutorial explains how to configure your permalinks in WordPress to help your content get better indexing in search engines.

Changing Your WordPress Permalinks

Log into your WP dashboard and click on 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 search engine friendly URLs instead for our posts. To do this, we 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 search engine-friendly URLs …

(Configure 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/budget-cruises/how-to-save-money-on-cruise-travel

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=7050

(Using post name permalinks helps search engines and readers understand what the post is about)

How To Create Pretty WordPress URLs

“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, displayed as four digits (e.g. ‘2014’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘08’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘25’)
• %hour% – The hour the post is published (e.g. ‘24’)
• %minute% – The minute the post is published (e.g. ‘43’)
• %second% – The exact second the post gets published (e.g. ‘03’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘9449’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of the post title. For example, if your post title is ”Ten Best Hotels In Cote D’Azur!”, the postname tag will convert this into “ten-best-hotels-in-cote-dazur” (all characters converted to lower case and no exclamation marks) in the URL. Tip: You can always 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 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.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

If you need to set up custom permalinks for your tag and category archive page URLs here is where you would do this.

You can change the ‘base’ category or tag for 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 “news” would make your category links display as ‘http://domain.com/news/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 this …

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

Remember to save your changes when you have 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

Use Descriptive Categories

To get the optimal benefit from using Permalinks, you will need 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 plugin developer Joost de Valk, here are some things to consider if you are wondering whether you should add categories to your permalink structure or not:

• If your category slug is short and descriptive (e.g. uses a relevant keyword or keyword phrase), you may want to add the category tag 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 reduce the SEO benefit.
• 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 category vs no category there 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 post URLs short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We cover WordPress categories in other tutorials.

Avoid Using URL Syntaxes That Date Your Content

Another useful tip from Joost de Valk is that unless you plan to run a news blog or you have a special reason to add dates to your post URLs, avoid using date-based permalink options for your URLs.

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

People are less likely to click on posts that are a couple of years old, even if the content is relevant to the answers they are searching for.

Changing Permalinks In Site With Published Posts

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

If your website has been running for a while 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 really necessary, as doing so could create issues and loss of traffic.

Add 301 Redirects

As you’ve seen in the above screenshots of actual search results, some website 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. Maybe 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 remove the date portion in your permalinks.

The best way to change your URL structure without affecting your site’s SEO in a negative way is to use ‘301 redirections’ to reassign all links that were set up using the old permalink structure to destinations that use the new permalink structure.

A ’301′ code is interpreted by search engines as a link that has permanently relocated. 301 redirects are the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect users to new web page destinations and avoid ‘404’ (Page not found) errors if clicking on an old link.

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

You can add a link redirection system to your do this using a WP plugin 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 problems and troubleshoot any errors.

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

Congratulations! Now you know how to configure your blog to display SEO-friendly URLs for your posts and improve your search results. To learn more about using Permalinks, refer to the WordPress codex here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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