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

• Visitors could gain an understanding of what your content was about,
• Google could find your posts faster,
• Each post on your website would have its own unique identifier, making things easier to manage.

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

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 web address that other people use to link to your posts or sections of your site or the links you send in an email pointing to posts on your site. Some people also refer to permalinks as “pretty” URLs.

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

Why Do You Need To Use Permalinks?

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 the SEO aspect can be easily finetuned with SEO plugins.

If you are looking to optimize the SEO aspect of your site or blog, then you cannot ignore the importance of your site’s URLs. Google places considerable weight on the URL structure of a site.

Permalinks can be used to turn links on your site into memorable and more “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 you should configure your permalinks if publishing content in WordPress.

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

WordPress uses the link structure with a string query shown above to find data inside its database. It doesn’t really mean much to anyone, and it doesn’t help your site with on-site search engine optimization.

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

Although Google is clearly still indexing the above sites, they are potentially missing out on additional SEO benefits.

To get the most SEO benefit from using WordPress and improve your site’s rankings, you will want to make sure to configure your permalinks structure to make it more search engine-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 posts, so your pages can go from this …

To this …

Out of the box, WordPress post URLs are not very SEO-friendly. In this step-by-step tutorial, you will learn how to configure your permalinks in WordPress to display your posts using SEO-friendly URLs.

Setting Up Your WordPress Permalinks

In your WordPress dashboard click on, 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 search engine friendly URLs instead for our posts. To do this, we will need to specify a different Permalink structure than the default.

Common Settings

In the Common Settings section, select Custom Structure, then add one or more ‘tags’ (see below) to create search engine-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=7311

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

How To Add Search Engine-Friendly Tags In WordPress

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

• %year% – The year the post gets published, displayed as four digits (e.g. ‘2012’)
• %monthnum% – The month the post is published (e.g. ‘04’)
• %day% – The day your post is published (e.g. ‘03’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘07’)
• %minute% – The minute your post gets published (e.g. ‘36’)
• %second% – The exact second the post is published (e.g. ‘09’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘7583’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of your post title. For example, if the post title is ”The Five Don’ts Of DIY Home Repair!”, the postname tag will convert this into “the-five-donts-of-diy-home-repair” (all lower case letters 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 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 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 adding the /%postname%/ tag in the ‘Custom Structure’ setting.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

Here you can enter custom structures for your tag and category archive pages.

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

So, if you add the following to your permalinks Optional > Category base settings section …

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

To something like this …

If you leave these fields blank WordPress uses the defaults.

Remember to save your changes after 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 Info

Set Up Your Categories

To get the optimal SEO benefit from using Permalinks, you will need 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 Joost de Valk, here are a few points to consider if you are wondering whether you should add categories to your permalinks or not:

• If your domain is short and your category name is short and descriptive (e.g. uses a relevant keyword or keyword phrase), 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 share and decrease the SEO benefit.
• Do you plan to post content under only one category or multiple categories? If you are going 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 is no ideal permalink structure to use. Use the permalink structure that you think will suit your site best. SEO experts recommend making your web addresses short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We cover WordPress categories in other tutorials.

Don’t Use Date Permalinks

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

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

People are less likely to click on posts that are 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 permalinks when you create a new WordPress site. This should be part of your website planning process.

If your site has been running for a while or your site already has many 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 making changes to permalinks after your site has been running for a while can create issues and errors.

Add 301 Redirects

As you’ve seen earlier, many WordPress users (or their web developers) are completely unaware of the permalinks feature of WordPress.

Maybe when you started, your site used the default WordPress URL structure and now you want to optimize your site better for search engines. Perhaps your site was configured to display post dates in your URLs and now all of your posts are showing as being 2-3 years old and you want to delete the date tags in your permalinks.

To modify your URL structure without negatively affecting your site’s SEO or rankings you will need to use ‘301 redirects’ to reassign all links that were set up using the old permalinks structure to links that use the new permalink structure.

A code ‘301’ is interpreted by search engines as a link that has permanently relocated to another destination. 301 redirection is the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect users to new website destinations and avoid ”page not found” errors when they click on an old link.

To effectively change your permalink structure and avoid SEO problems, 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 site using WordPress redirection plugins 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 URL redirections using plugins or use the services of a professional)

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

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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