Wouldn’t it be great if after publishing new content on your WordPress website or blog, the following happened … all from your web address:

• Potential visitors to your site could understand what the content was about,
• Search engines could discover your pages faster,
• Every item of content added to your website would have a unique identifier, making things easier to manage.

Well, this is what WordPress permalinks let you do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – Definition

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

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

Permalinks – Why Use Them?

As you probably know, 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 straight out of the box, but there are excellent SEO plugins you can use that can further help to improve its SEO aspect.

If you focus on the SEO aspect of your website, then you should not ignore the importance of your URLs. Google tends to pay special attention to the URL structure of a site.

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 take a look at why it’s best to use permalinks in WordPress.

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

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

As the screenshot image below shows, many site owners have not yet configured their permalinks …

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

To get the best possible SEO benefit out of using WordPress and improve your site’s traffic results, 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 lets you create a custom URL structure for your published and archived posts, so your pages can go from something that is non-SEO friendly like this …

To something with an SEO-friendly URL like this …

In this tutorial, you will learn how to configure your WordPress permalinks to display your posts with search engine-friendly URLs instead of the out-of-the-box URL structure and help every new post you add automatically get better indexing results in search engines like Google.

Changing WordPress Permalinks

In your WordPress administration menu, click on Settings > Permalinks …

This will bring 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 search engine friendly URLs instead for our posts. To do this, we will need to specify a different Permalink structure than the one set by default.

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/cruise-deals/cruise-holiday-deals

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=9619

(Using post name permalinks helps readers and search engines understand what the page is about)

WordPress Permalink 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, four digits (e.g. ‘2014’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘02’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘05’)
• %hour% – The hour the post gets published (e.g. ‘14’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘20’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘07’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘3940’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted version of your post title. For example, if your post title is ”Ten Best Hotels In Cote D’Azur!”, the postname tag will convert this into “ten-best-hotels-in-cote-dazur” (all letters converted to lower case and removed exclamation symbols) in the URL. Tip: You can edit the URL wording 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 selecting the ‘Custom Structure’ setting and using the /%postname%/ tag.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

In this section, you can set custom structures for your category and tag archive pages.

You can change the ‘base’ tag or category of 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 “recipes” will make your category links display as ‘http://domain.com/recipes/category_name/’.

So, if you make the following change 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 optional settings fields blank WordPress uses the defaults.

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 Notes

Use Short, Descriptive Categories

To get more SEO 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 a few points to consider if you are wondering whether you should add categories to your permalink structure 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 use categories 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 category vs no category there really is no ideal permalink structure to use. Choose the permalink structure you think will suit your site best. Your web addresses should be short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We provide detailed information about WordPress categories in another tutorial.

Avoid Setting Up Permalink Syntaxes That Date Your Posts

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

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 site has been running for a while or your site already has a lot of content 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 in the above screenshots of actual search results, many WordPress site owners (or their web developers) are completely unaware of the SEO-friendly URLs feature of WordPress.

Maybe you started out using the default WordPress URL structure and now you would like to improve your site’s SEO. Maybe your website was configured to display post dates in your URLs and now all of your content is perceived as being out-of-date and you want to delete the date portion of your permalinks.

The best way to modify your permalinks without negatively affecting your site’s SEO or existing rankings is to add ‘301 redirects’ to reassign links set up using the previous URL structure to web addresses that use the new permalink structure.

Search engines interpret a ’301′ code as a link that has permanently been relocated. 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 they click on an old link.

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

You can WP site or blog using a plugin like Simple 301 Redirects, or Redirection, or get a professional to assist you with setting up and redirecting your permalinks correctly to avoid any problems and troubleshoot any errors.

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

Congratulations! Now you know how to configure your WordPress site to display SEO-friendly URLs for your posts. For additional information on using Permalinks, refer to the WordPress codex here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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