Wouldn’t it be great if after publishing a new post on your WordPress website, the following took place … all from your web address:

• Potential visitors to your site could easily tell what the post is about,
• Search engines would discover your pages faster,
• Every single piece of content created on your website would have a unique ID, making things easier to manage.

Well, this is what a 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 group things together) like archives.

A permalink is the URL that others use to link to your articles or sections of your site or the links you send in emails pointing readers to content items on your site. Some people also call permalinks “pretty” URLs.

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

Why Use Permalinks?

Hopefully, you are probably aware that, WordPress is one of the best Content Management Systems you can use when it comes to SEO.

WordPress is not only great for SEO out of the box, but there are excellent SEO plugins you can use that can help to enhance its SEO aspect considerably.

If you focus on the SEO aspect of your site or blog, then you cannot ignore the importance of its site’s URLs. Google tends to give special consideration to the URL structure of a site.

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

Now … let’s take a look at the reason why you may need to use permalinks 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 locate information within your database. It does not mean anything to search engines or visitors, and it doesn’t help your website with on-site SEO.

As you can see from the screenshot below, many site owners have not configured their permalinks to publish search optimized content …

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

To get greater SEO benefit out of using WordPress 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 numbers and symbols.

WordPress lets you 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 this …

By default, WordPress post URLs are not very SEO-friendly. This tutorial shows you how to configure your permalinks in WordPress to automatically help you get better indexing results in Google.

Setting Up Your WordPress Permalinks

In your WordPress dashboard click on, Settings > Permalinks …

This will bring 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 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 SEO-friendly URLs …

(Change 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/top-three-european-cruise-destinations

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=6953

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

How To Use Permalink Tags In WordPress

“Pretty” permalinks, or SEO-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. ‘2015’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘11’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘20’)
• %hour% – The hour the post is published (e.g. ‘06’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘11’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘49’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘6051’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of your post title. For example, if your 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 letters and removed punctuation marks) in the URL. Tip: You can edit the URL text 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’.

Optional Permalink Settings

If you need to set up custom permalinks for your tag and category URLs here is where you would do this.

You can change the ‘base’ category or tag URLs using the following structure:

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

For example, using “recipes” as your category base will display your category links as ‘http://domain.com/recipes/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 fields blank WordPress uses the default settings.

Remember to save your changes when 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 Information

Categories

To get maximum 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 plugin developer Joost de Valk, here are a few things to consider if you are wondering whether or not to add categories to your permalinks:

• 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 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.

Ultimately, when it comes to category vs no category there is no ideal permalink structure to use. Choose the permalink structure you think will suit your needs best. Many SEO experts and webmasters recommend making your post URLs short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We cover WordPress categories in another tutorial.

Avoid Using Date-Based Permalink Syntax

Another tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your website provides news or time-specific information, or there is a special reason why you need to create dated website addresses, avoid using date-based permalink syntax for your blog’s URLs.

(Avoid setting up URL structures that time-stamp your posts)

Although using URL structures that date your content is better that using no permalinks at all from an SEO aspect, visitors are less likely to click on posts that are a couple of years old, even if the content is relevant to the answers they are searching for.

What About Changing Permalinks In Established Sites?

Normally, it’s best to set up your site’s permalinks when you first install WordPress. This should be part of your website planning process.

If your website 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 changing permalinks after your site has been up and running for a while could create issues and errors.

Add 301 Redirection

As you’ve seen in the above screenshots of actual search results, many WordPress users (or their web developers) are unaware of the permalinks feature of WordPress.

Maybe when you started out, your site used the default WordPress URL structure and now you would like to improve your site’s SEO. Perhaps your website or blog was originally set up to display post dates in your URLs and now all of your posts are showing as being two or three years old and you want to remove the date tags in the permalinks.

The best way to change your permalink structure without negatively affecting your site’s SEO or rankings is to add ‘301 redirections’ to point all links that use the old URL structure to links using the new syntax.

Search engines interpret a code ‘301’ as a link that has permanently relocated to another address. 301 redirects are the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect users to new website destinations and avoid running into ‘404’ (Page not found) errors if they click on an old link.

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

You can site or blog 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 any issues and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up a link redirection system for your changed permalinks using plugins or use the services of a professional)

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

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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