Wouldn’t it be great if you could just publish content on your WordPress site, and the following happened … all from your post address:

• Visitors could quickly assess what the post was about,
• Google would easily discover your page and correctly index its content for better search rankings,
• Every single content item on your website or blog would have its own unique identifier, making things easier to manage.

Well, this is what WordPress permalinks let you do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalink – What Is It?

A permalink is the permanent URL to an individual WordPress post, category, or other taxonomy (a way to group things together) like archives.

A permalink is the URL that people and search engines will use to link to your articles or sections of your site or the links you send in an email pointing readers to content items on your blog. Some people also call permalinks “pretty” URLs.

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

Why Do You Need To Use Permalinks?

Hopefully, by now you are probably aware that, WordPress is one of the best CMS tools 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 further help to finetune its SEO aspect.

If you focus on the SEO aspect of your site, then you should not ignore the importance of your site’s URLs. Search engines like Google tend to give special significance to the structure of a site’s URLs when indexing its content.

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

Now … let’s review the reason why it’s best to use permalinks in WordPress.

By default, a WordPress installation uses a URL structure for your posts that isn’t very search engine friendly and looks like this …

WordPress uses the link structure with a string query shown above to locate data inside its database. It doesn’t really help your website with on-site SEO.

As the screenshot image taken from Google search results below shows, many site owners haven’t set up their sites to use permalinks …

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

To get optimal SEO benefit from using and improve your site’s rankings, you should configure your permalinks structure to make it more SEO-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 pages can easily go from this …

To something like this …

By default, WordPress post URLs are not very search engine-friendly. This tutorial explains how to set up the Permalinks section of your WordPress site to automatically get better indexing in search engines like Google.

How To Set Up Your WordPress Permalinks

From your WP admin 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 “pretty” permalinks instead for our posts. To do this, we will need to specify a different Permalink structure than the default one.

Common Settings – Permalinks

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

(Change 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/romantic-cruise-holiday-deals

Instead of this …

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

(Using permalinks helps visitors understand what your page is about)

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, displayed as four digits (e.g. ‘2015’)
• %monthnum% – The month the post gets published (e.g. ‘08’)
• %day% – The day your post gets published (e.g. ‘14’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘06’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘60’)
• %second% – The exact second your post is published (e.g. ‘10’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘8614’)
• %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 characters converted to lower case and exclamation symbols removed) in the URL. Tip: You can always edit this 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 adding the /%postname%/ tag in the ‘Custom Structure’ option.

Optional Permalink Settings

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

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 “recipes” as your category base would make your category links display as ‘http://domain.com/recipes/uncategorized/’.

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 fields blank the default settings will be used.

Remember to save your 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 – Additional Notes

Set Up Categories

To get more 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 some points to keep in mind if you are wondering whether or not to add categories to your permalink structure:

• If your category is short and descriptive (e.g. adds a relevant keyword or keyword phrase to your URL), 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 share or copy and decrease 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 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 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 post URLs short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We cover WordPress categories in other tutorials.

Make Your Content Timeless

Another useful tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your aim is to run a news website or blog or there is a special reason why you need to create dated website URLs, avoid using date-based permalink settings when setting up your site’s URLs.

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

Although using permalinks that date your content is better that using no permalinks at all from an SEO aspect, people are less likely to click on posts that are several years old, even if the content is relevant to what they are searching for.

Changing Permalinks In An Established Blog

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

If your website or blog 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 something that absolutely needs doing, as doing so can create issues and errors.

301 Redirection

As you’ve seen earlier, many WordPress users (or their web developers) are unaware of the search-friendly URLs feature of WordPress.

Maybe when you started, your site used the default WordPress URL structure and now you would like to improve your site’s SEO. Maybe your site was configured to display post dates in your web address and now all of your content is showing as being two or three years old and you want to remove the date tags in your URLs.

The best way to change your permalinks without impacting your site’s SEO or existing rankings in a negative way is to use ‘301 redirections’ to reassign all links that use the previous URL syntax to page URLs that use 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 users to new web page destinations and avoid running into page errors if clicking on an old link.

To create an effective permalink syntax change and avoid SEO problems, sending visitors to error pages, etc. you will need to configure your redirection system before changing the permalink structure of your site.

You can add a link redirection system to your do this using WP redirection plugins like Simple 301 Redirects, or Redirection, or get a professional to help you set up and redirect your permalinks correctly to avoid any issues and troubleshoot any errors.

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

Congratulations! Now you know how to set up your WordPress site to display search engine-friendly URLs for your posts and improve your search search rankings. For additional information on using Permalinks, see the official WordPress documentation below:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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