Wouldn’t it be great if you could publish new content on your site, and the following happened … all from your web address:

• Potential visitors could gain an understanding of what your page is about,
• Google could find your pages faster,
• Each item of content on your website would have its own unique ID, making your content easier to manage.

Well, with WordPress permalinks this is very easy to do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – What Are They?

A permalink is the permanent URL to your individual WordPress posts, categories and other taxonomies (a way to group things together) like archives.

A permalink is the URL that visitors and search engines will 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 blog. Permalinks are sometimes referred to as “pretty” URLs.

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

Why Do You Need To Use Permalinks?

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

WordPress is not only great for SEO out of the box, but there are excellent SEO plugins you can install 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 its site’s URLs. Search engines like Google place considerable weight on the URL structure of a site.

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

Now … let’s turn our attention to why you should set up permalinks in WordPress.

Typically, a default WordPress installation uses a URL structure for your posts that isn’t search engine friendly and looks like this …

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

As you can see from the screenshot image below taken from Google search listings, many WordPress site owners have not configured their permalinks …

Although Google is still indexing the above sites, many site owners are potentially missing out on extra SEO benefits.

To get maximum SEO benefit from using 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 characters.

WordPress allows you to create a custom URL structure for your published and archived posts, so your content can easily go from something that is non-SEO friendly like this …

To something like this …

Out of the box, WordPress URLs are not very SEO-friendly. This step-by-step tutorial shows you how to set up your permalinks in WordPress to help your content rank better in Google.

Changing Your WordPress Permalinks

From your WP administration menu, select 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 need to specify a different Permalink structure than the 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/river-cruises/5-top-european-river-cruises

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=1113

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

WordPress Permalink Tags

“Pretty” URLs, or SEO-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. ‘2010’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘08’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘29’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘06’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘25’)
• %second% – The exact second the post is published (e.g. ‘07’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘34’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of your post title. For example, if your 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 characters converted to lower case and exclamation marks removed) in the URL. Tip: You can edit this text in the post slug field on the Add/Edit Post/Page screens.
• %category% – A sanitized 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 selecting ‘Custom Structure’ and using the /%postname%/ tag.

Optional Permalink Settings

This section lets you set up custom structures for your tag and category pages.

You can change the ‘base’ category or tag for your 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 would display your category links as ‘http://domain.com/recipes/uncategorized/’.

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

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

To something like this …

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

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 – Tips

Use Short, Descriptive Categories

To get the best possible SEO benefit out of using Permalinks, remember 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 a few things to consider if you are wondering whether or not to add categories to your permalink structure:

• If your category slug is short and descriptive (e.g. adds a relevant keyword or keyword phrase to your URL), you may want to add the category tag 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 we recommend not using the category tag in your permalink structure.

Despite being the subject of intense debate in WordPress SEO circles, when it comes to using category vs no category there is no ”better” permalink structure to use. Use a permalink structure that you think will suit your site best. Your post URLs 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 Permalinks That Date Your Posts

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

(Avoid setting up URL structures that date your content)

Although setting up permalinks that time-stamp your content may be considered better that using no permalinks at all from an SEO point-of-view, 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.

Changing The Permalink Structure In An Established Site

Normally, it’s best to configure your site’s permalinks when you first install WordPress. This should be part of your website 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 something that absolutely needs doing, as changing permalinks after your site has been running for a while can create issues and errors.

301 Redirects

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

Maybe when you started, your site used the default WordPress permalinks and now you want to improve your site’s SEO. Maybe your website was configured to display post dates in your URLs and now all of your posts are perceived as being outdated and you want to delete the date portion of the URLs.

The best way to edit your permalinks without negatively impacting your site’s SEO or existing rankings is to add ‘301 redirects’ to reassign links set up using the old permalinks syntax to URLs that use the new syntax.

Search engines interpret a ’301′ code as a link that has been permanently moved. 301 redirects are the most efficient and search engine friendly way to redirect users to new web page destinations and avoid running into ‘404’ (Page not found) errors when they click on an old link.

To create an effective permalink structure change and avoid damaging your rankings, sending visitors to broken links, etc. you will need to configure a redirection system before changing the permalink structure of your site.

You can site or blog using WP redirection plugins 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 problems and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up 301 redirects 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. For additional information on using Permalinks, see the official WordPress documentation below:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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