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

• New visitors could understand what the page is about,
• Search engines could easily find your posts and correctly index their content for better search results,
• Every single content item you create on your site would have its own unique ID, making your site easier to manage.

Well, this is what permalinks let you do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – Definition

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

Permalinks make the URLs to each post on your site permanent, hence a permalink.

Why Use Permalinks?

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

WordPress is not only great for SEO out of the box, but the SEO aspect can be easily improved using excellent SEO plugins.

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

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

Now … let’s turn our attention to the reason why it’s best 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 above link structure to locate data inside your database. It doesn’t really mean anything to either search engines or visitors, and it doesn’t help your website with on-site SEO.

As the screenshot below shows, many WordPress site owners are still using out of the box settings when publishing content online …

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

To get the most SEO benefit out of using WordPress 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 characters.

WordPress offers you the ability to create a custom URL structure for your published posts, so your pages can go from this …

To something like this …

In this tutorial, you will learn how to configure the Permalinks section of your WordPress site to display posts with search engine-friendly URLs instead of the default linking structure and help every new post you publish get better indexing results in search engines like Google.

Configuring Your WordPress Permalinks

From your WordPress main menu, select 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 search engine friendly URL instead for our posts. To do this, we 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 SEO-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/europe-cruises/top-ten-european-river-cruises

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=347

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

Creating Permalink Tags In Custom Structure

“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. ‘2012’)
• %monthnum% – The month your post gets published (e.g. ‘01’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘28’)
• %hour% – The hour your post gets published (e.g. ‘13’)
• %minute% – The minute the post gets published (e.g. ‘21’)
• %second% – The exact second your post gets published (e.g. ‘45’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘417’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of the post title. For example, if your post title is “Top Five Budget Travel Tips!”, the postname tag will convert this into “top-five-budget-travel-tips” (all letters converted to lower case and exclamation marks removed) in the URL. Tip: You can edit the wording in your post titles in the post slug field on the Add/Edit Post/Page screens.
• %category% – A correctly formatted 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

Here you can set custom structures for your category and tag URLs.

This changes the ‘base’ tag or category for your URLs using the following syntax:

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

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

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

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

To something like this …

If you leave the fields blank WordPress uses the defaults.

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

Use Descriptive Categories

To get the optimal 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 and author of the WordPress SEO plugin Joost de Valk, here are some points to consider if you are wondering whether or not to add categories to your permalinks:

• If your category name 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 share or copy and decrease the SEO benefit.
• 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.

Despite being the subject of intense debate in WordPress SEO circles, when it comes to adding category vs no category there really is no ideal permalink structure to use. We recommend choosing the permalink structure you think will suit your needs best and that will make your site’s web addresses short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We provide more information about WordPress categories in another tutorial.

Make Your Content Timeless

Another useful tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your site provides news, or you have a special reason to create dated web addresses, it’s best to avoid using date-based permalink settings when configuring your site’s URLs.

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

Although setting up URL structures that date your posts may be considered better that using no permalinks at all from an SEO point-of-view, visitors are less likely to click on posts that are several years old, even if the content is relevant to what they are searching for.

What If My Blog Has Content?

Normally, your permalinks should be set up when you first install WordPress. This should be part of your website planning process.

If your website or blog has been running for a while or your site already has a lot of posts 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 changing permalinks after your site has been up and running for a while could create issues and loss of traffic.

Use 301 Redirection

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

Maybe you started out using the default WordPress URL structure and now you want to improve your SEO. Maybe your website or blog was configured to display post dates in your URLs and now all of your content is showing as being old and you want to remove the date portion of your permalinks.

To modify your URL structure without negatively impacting your site’s SEO or rankings you will need to use ‘301 redirections’ to reassign links that were set up using the previous permalinks syntax to URLs that use the new permalink structure.

Search engines interpret a code ‘301’ as a link that has permanently been relocated. 301 redirection is the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect users to new website destinations and avoid ‘404’ (Page not found) errors when clicking on an old link.

To effectively change your syntax and avoid damaging your search rankings, sending visitors to broken links, etc. you will need to configure your 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 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 issues and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up 301 redirects using redirection plugins or get professional help)

Congratulations! Now you know about the built-in system WordPress uses to display SEO-friendly URLs for your posts and improve your search search rankings. To learn more about using Permalinks, see the WordPress codex below:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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