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

• Potential visitors to your site could quickly tell what your content is about,
• Google would be able to easily discover your page and correctly index its content for better search rankings,
• Every single item of content you create on your website would have a unique ID, making your content easier to manage.

Well, this is what a WordPress permalink lets you do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

What’s A Permalink?

Permalinks are the permanent URLs to an individual post, category, or other taxonomy (a way to group things together) like archives.

A permalink is the URL that other people use to link to your posts or sections of your site or the links you send in an email pointing readers to your posts. Some people also call permalinks “pretty” URLs.

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

Why Do You Need To Use Permalinks?

As you have probably heard by now, WordPress is one of the best Content Management Systems you can use when it comes to publishing search engines optimized content.

WordPress is not only well optimized right out of the box, but there are SEO plugins you can install that will help to improve its SEO aspect further.

If you focus on the SEO aspect of your site or blog, then you cannot ignore the importance of its site’s URLs. Search engines like Google tend to give special significance to the URL structure of your site.

Permalinks can be 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 the reason why you should set up permalinks if publishing content in WordPress.

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

The above link structure is used by WordPress to locate information inside its database. It does not mean anything to search engines or visitors, and it doesn’t help your website with on-site search engine optimization.

As you can see from the screenshot below, many site owners have not configured their sites to use permalinks …

Although these sites are still getting their content indexed on search engines, they are potentially missing out on extra SEO benefits.

To get the best SEO benefit out of using and improve your site’s traffic results, you will want to make sure to 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 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 step-by-step tutorial shows you how to configure the Permalinks section of your WordPress site to automatically help you get better indexing in Google.

Changing Your WordPress Permalinks

Log into your WordPress administration area 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 a “pretty” permalink instead for our posts. To do this, we will need to specify a different Permalink structure than the default one.

Permalinks - Common Settings

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

(Set up 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/how-to-save-money-on-cruise-travel

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=8621

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

SEO-Friendly Tags

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

• %year% – The year of the post, four digits (e.g. ‘2014’)
• %monthnum% – The month your post gets published (e.g. ‘01’)
• %day% – The day your post is published (e.g. ‘03’)
• %hour% – The hour your post gets published (e.g. ‘08’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘35’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘57’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘6768’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of the post title. For example, if the post title is ”Ten Signs That You’re About To Get Fired From Your Job!”, the postname tag will convert this into “ten-signs-that-youre-about-to-get-fired-from-your-job” (all lower case characters and no exclamation symbols) in the URL. Tip: You can edit the wording in your post title 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 ‘Custom Structure’.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

This section lets you set up custom structures for your category and tag 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, changing your category base to “news” would display your category links as ‘http://domain.com/news/category_name/’.

So, if you make the following change in your permalinks Optional > Category base settings section …

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

To this …

If you leave the optional settings 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 Info

Categories

To get the maximum benefit out of using Permalinks, you will need 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 a few things to consider if you are wondering whether you should add categories to your permalinks or not:

• If your domain is short and your category is short and descriptive (e.g. adds a relevant keyword or keyword phrase to your URL), you may want to add categories 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 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.

Despite being the subject of intense debate in WordPress SEO circles, when it comes to adding category vs no category there really is no ”better” permalink structure to use. Choose a permalink structure that you think will suit your site best. Your web address should be short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We provide more information about WordPress categories in another tutorial.

Don’t Use Date Permalinks

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

(Avoid using permalinks that time-stamp your posts)

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

What About Changing Permalinks In An Established Blog?

Normally, it’s best to configure your site’s 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 your site already has many posts indexed in the search engines and you want to change the permalink structure, make sure that this is absolutely something that needs to be done, as changing permalinks after your site has already been going for a while can create SEO issues and loss of traffic.

Add 301 Redirection

As you’ve seen earlier, many site owners (or whoever set up their site) are completely unaware of the SEO-friendly URLs feature of WordPress.

Maybe you started out using the default WordPress permalinks and now you want to improve your SEO. Perhaps your website or blog was configured to display post dates in your web address and now all of your content is showing as being 2-3 years old and you want to remove the date tags in the URLs.

To modify your permalinks without negatively affecting your site’s SEO you should use ‘301 redirections’ to reassign all links using the previous permalinks syntax to post URLs using the new permalinks structure.

A code ‘301’ is interpreted by search engines as a link that has permanently moved to another destination. 301 redirection is the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect users to new web page destinations and avoid running into page errors when they click on an old link.

To effectively change your permalink structure and avoid damaging your rankings, sending visitors to error pages, etc. you should install and set up 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 WordPress 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 issues and troubleshoot any errors.

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

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

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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