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

• New visitors could easily assess what the page is about,
• Google would be able to discover your pages faster,
• Every single item of content added to your website would have its own unique ID, making your site easier to manage.

Well, with WordPress permalinks this can easily be done!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – Definition

Permalinks are the permanent URLs to your individual WordPress posts, categories and other taxonomies (a way to organize things together) like archives.

A permalink is the URL that people and search engines will use to link to your posts or sections of your site or the links you send in emails pointing readers to a specific post on your blog. Some people also call permalinks “pretty” URLs.

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

Permalinks – Why Use Them?

Hopefully, by now you probably know that, WordPress is one of the best CMS applications available when it comes to publishing search engines optimized content.

WordPress is not only great for SEO out of the box, but its SEO aspect can be easily finetuned with SEO plugins.

If you focus on the SEO aspect of your site or blog, then you should not ignore the importance of your URLs. Search engines like Google tend to pay special attention to the URL structure of your site.

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

Now … let’s review why it’s best to use permalinks when publishing content in WordPress.

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

WordPress uses the link structure shown above to find information within your database. It doesn’t really help your website with on-site search engine optimization.

As the screenshot image below shows, many WordPress users haven’t set up their sites to use WordPress permalinks …

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

To get maximum SEO benefit from using WordPress 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 numbers and symbols.

WordPress offers the ability to create a custom URL structure for your published and archived posts, so your content can easily go from this …

To this …

Out of the box, WordPress URLs are not very search engine-friendly. In this step-by-step tutorial, you will learn how to configure your WordPress permalinks to help your content rank better in search engines.

Setting Up WordPress Permalinks

In your WP admin menu, select Settings > Permalinks …

This brings 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 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 …

(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/europe-travel/how-to-save-money-on-cruise-travel

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=2333

(Using post name permalinks helps visitors and search engines understand what your content is about)

Pretty URL Tags

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

• %year% – The year of the post, displayed as four digits (e.g. ‘2015’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘08’)
• %day% – The day your post is published (e.g. ‘10’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘15’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘17’)
• %second% – The exact second your post is published (e.g. ‘26’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘8767’)
• %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 symbols removed) in the URL. Tip: You can 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 correctly formatted 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 selecting ‘Custom Structure’ and adding the /%postname%/ tag.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

This section lets you set up custom structures for your tag and category archive pages.

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

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

For example, using “topics” as your category base would display your category links as ‘http://domain.com/topics/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 something like this …

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

Remember to save any 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 – Additional Information

Categories

To get the best possible benefit from 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 and author of the WordPress SEO plugin Joost de Valk, here are a few points to keep in mind if you are wondering whether you should add categories to your permalinks or not:

• If your category is short and descriptive (e.g. uses a relevant keyword or keyword phrase), you may want to use the category tag 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 copy and reduce 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.

Despite being the subject of intense debate in WordPress SEO circles, when it comes to using category vs no category there really 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 site’s web addresses short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We cover WordPress categories in other articles.

Avoid Setting Up Permalinks That Time-Stamp Your Posts

Another tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your goal is to run a news website or there is a special reason why you need to date your content, it’s best to avoid selecting date-based permalink syntax when configuring your URLs.

(Avoid setting up URL structures that date your content)

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

What If My Blog Has Indexed Posts?

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 website is already established or your site already has a lot of posts indexed in the search engines and you want to change the permalink structure, make sure that this is something that absolutely needs doing, as doing so could create SEO issues and errors.

Use 301 Redirects

As you’ve seen in earlier screenshots, many WordPress users (or their web developers) seem to be unaware of the SEO-friendly URLs feature of WordPress.

Maybe when you started, your site used the default WordPress permalinks and now you want to improve your SEO. Maybe your site was configured to display post dates in your web address and now all of your posts are showing as being 2-3 years old and you want to remove the date tags of the permalinks.

To edit your permalink structure without negatively affecting your site’s SEO you will need to use ‘301 redirections’ to reassign links using the previous URL syntax to URLs using the new permalinks structure.

Search engines interpret a ’301′ code as a link that has been permanently moved elsewhere. 301 redirection is the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect visitors to new site destinations and avoid page errors when clicking on an old link.

To create an effective syntax change and avoid SEO problems, sending visitors to broken links, etc. you should set up your redirection system before messing with the permalink structure of your site.

You can WP site using a 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 issues and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up a link redirection system using redirection plugins or get professional assistance)

Congratulations! Now you know about the built-in system WordPress uses 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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