Wouldn’t it be great if after publishing a new post on your WordPress website, the following could happen … all from your page URL:

• Potential visitors to your site could easily understand what your page was about,
• Search engines could easily discover your page and correctly classify its content to improve your search results,
• Every single post created on your website would have its own unique ID, making your site 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 an individual WordPress post, category, or other taxonomy (a way to group things together) like archives.

A permalink is the web address that visitors and search engines will use to link to articles or sections of your site or the links you send in emails pointing to posts on your site. Permalinks are often called “pretty” URLs.

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

Why Use Permalinks?

As you probably know, WordPress is one of the best CMS tools you can use when it comes to SEO.

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

If you are looking to optimize the SEO aspect of your website, then you should not ignore the importance of your site’s URLs. Search engines like Google place considerable weight on the URL structure of a site.

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

Now … let’s review the reason why it’s best to configure your permalinks if publishing content in WordPress.

By default, a 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 data inside its database. It doesn’t really mean anything to search engines or visitors, and it doesn’t help your site with on-site SEO.

As you can see from the screenshot below, many WordPress users are still using out of the box permalink settings when publishing content …

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

To get the best possible SEO benefit from using WordPress and improve your site’s traffic results, you should 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 lets you create a custom URL structure for your published posts, so your pages can easily go from this …

To something with an SEO-friendly URL like this …

Out of the box, WordPress URLs are not very search engine-friendly. This step-by-step tutorial explains how to configure your permalinks in WordPress to automatically get better indexing in search engines.

Changing Your WordPress Permalinks

Log into your WP admin and 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 a search engine friendly URL instead for our posts. To do this, we 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 …

(Configure 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/how-to-save-money-on-cruise-travel

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=8944

(Using permalinks helps readers understand what your page is about)

Creating Permalink Tags In Custom Structure

“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. ‘2010’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘09’)
• %day% – The day the post is published (e.g. ‘11’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘22’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘29’)
• %second% – The exact second the post is published (e.g. ‘19’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘2401’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted version of the post title. For example, if the post title is ”Ten Best Hotels In Cote D’Azur!”, the postname tag will convert this into “ten-best-hotels-in-cote-dazur” (all characters converted to lower case and exclamation marks removed) in the URL. Tip: You can always 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 selecting the ‘Custom Structure’ setting and using the /%postname%/ tag.

Optional Permalink Settings

This section lets you configure custom structures for your category and tag URLs.

This changes the ‘base’ category or tag 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 make the following change in your permalinks Optional > Category base settings field …

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

To something like this …

If you leave the optional settings fields blank the default settings will be used.

Remember to save any 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 Notes

Use Descriptive Categories

To get maximum SEO benefit from using Permalinks, it’s important 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 some things to consider if you are wondering whether or not to add categories to your permalinks:

• If your domain is short and your category name 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 decrease 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 is no perfect permalink structure to use. We recommend choosing the permalink structure you think will suit your needs best and that will make your site’s web addresses short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We provide more information about WordPress categories in other articles.

Don’t Use Date Permalinks

Another great tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your website is a news blog or you have any special reason to add dates to your URLs, avoid choosing date-based permalink settings when setting up your URLs.

(Avoid using URL structures that date your content)

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

What If My Site Already Has Published Content?

Normally, your site’s permalinks should be set up when you install 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 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 errors.

301 Redirects

As you’ve seen earlier, some WordPress users (or whoever set up their site) seem to be unaware of the SEO-friendly URLs feature of WordPress.

Maybe when you started out, your site used the default WordPress permalinks and now you would like to optimize your site better for search engines. Perhaps your site was originally set up to display post dates in your URLs and now all of your posts are perceived as being out-of-date and you want to remove the date portion of your permalinks.

To change your URL structure without impacting your site’s SEO or rankings in a negative way you should use ‘301 redirects’ to point links using the old URL syntax to page URLs that use the new permalinks structure.

A code ‘301’ is interpreted by search engines as a link that has been permanently relocated. 301 redirects are the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect visitors to new website destinations and avoid running into ”page not found” errors when following an old link.

To effectively change your permalink syntax and avoid damaging your search rankings, sending visitors to error pages, etc. you will need to add a redirection system before changing the permalink structure of your site.

You can add a link redirection system to your do this using WP plugins like Simple 301 Redirects, or Redirection, or use the services of a professional to help you set up and redirect your permalinks correctly to avoid any problems and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up a 301 redirection system using redirection 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. For additional information on using Permalinks, refer to the WordPress codex here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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