Wouldn’t it be great if after publishing a new post on your site, the following took place … all from your URL:

• Potential site visitors could quickly understand what the content is about,
• Google could find your posts faster,
• Every single content item published on your website or blog would have a unique identifier, making your content easier to manage.

Well, with permalinks this can easily be done!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

What Is A Permalink?

A permalink is the permanent URL to an individual post, category, or other taxonomy (a way to group 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 a particular item of content on your site. Permalinks are often called “pretty” URLs.

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

Permalinks – Why Use Them?

As you probably know, 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 its SEO aspect can be easily fine tuned using excellent SEO plugins.

If you focus on the SEO aspect of your site or blog, then you cannot ignore the importance of its URLs. Google places considerable weight on the URL structure of a site.

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

Now … let’s see why you should configure your permalinks in WordPress.

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

The link structure shown above is used by WordPress to find information inside its database. It does not help your website with on-site search engine optimization.

As the screenshot from Google search results below shows, many site owners have not yet set up their sites to use permalinks …

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

To get maximum 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 characters.

WordPress allows you to create a custom URL structure for your published and archived posts, so your content can go from something that is non-SEO friendly like this …

To something like this …

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

Setting Up WordPress Permalinks

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

Common Permalink Settings

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 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/budget-cruises/top-seven-european-cruise-destinations

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=6022

(Using permalinks helps visitors and search engines understand what the content is about)

Permalink Tags

“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, four digits (e.g. ‘2014’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘07’)
• %day% – The day your post is published (e.g. ‘21’)
• %hour% – The hour your post is published (e.g. ‘17’)
• %minute% – The minute the post gets published (e.g. ‘46’)
• %second% – The exact second your post gets published (e.g. ‘60’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘3782’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted version of your 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 lower case letters and exclamation symbol deleted) in the URL. Tip: You can edit this text 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 the ‘Custom Structure’ option and using the /%postname%/ tag.

Optional Permalink Settings

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

This changes 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 “topics” will display your category links as ‘http://domain.com/topics/uncategorized/’.

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 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 – Tips

Use Short, Descriptive Categories

To get the optimal SEO 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 things to consider if you are wondering whether or not to add categories to your permalink structure:

• If your domain is short and 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 share and reduce 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.

Ultimately, when it comes to using category vs no category there really is no ideal permalink structure to use. Use the permalink structure that 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 Using Time-Specific URLs

Another tip from Joost de Valk is that unless you run a news website or there is a special reason why you need to date your site’s content, avoid selecting date-based permalink options when setting up your URLs.

(Avoid setting up permalinks that date your content)

Visitors are less likely to click on posts that are several years old, even if the content is relevant to the answers they are searching for.

What About Blogs With Indexed Content?

Normally, your permalinks should be set up when you create a new WordPress site. This should be part of your website planning process.

If your site is already established 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 absolutely something that needs to be done, as making changes to permalinks after your site has already been going for a while could create SEO issues and loss of traffic.

Use 301 Redirection

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

Maybe you started out using the default WordPress permalinks and now you would like to optimize your site better for search engines. Perhaps your website or blog was originally set up to display post dates in your URLs and now all of your content is perceived as being outdated and you want to remove the date portion of your permalinks.

The best way to edit your permalinks without negatively affecting your site’s SEO or rankings is to use ‘301 redirections’ to point all links set up using the previous permalinks structure to URLs using the new permalink syntax.

Search engines interpret a ’301′ code as a link that has permanently relocated to another destination. 301 redirection is the most efficient and search engine friendly way to redirect users to new web page destinations and avoid running into ”page not found” errors if clicking on an old link.

To create an effective syntax change and avoid damaging your rankings, sending visitors to error pages, etc. you should 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 assist you with setting up and redirecting your permalinks correctly to avoid problems and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up 301 redirections using plugins or use the services of a professional)

Congratulations! Now you know about the built-in system WordPress uses to display search engine-friendly URLs for your posts and improve your search results. For additional information on using Permalinks, see the WordPress codex below:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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