Wouldn’t it be great if after adding a new page to your WordPress website, the following happened … just from your post address:

• Potential visitors could easily assess what your post is about,
• Google would easily find your post and correctly classify your content for better search results,
• Every single content item you create on your website or blog would have its own unique identifier, making things easier to manage.

Well, with WordPress permalinks you can easily do this!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

What Is A Permalink?

Permalinks are the permanent URLs to your individual posts, categories and other taxonomies (a way to group things together) like archives.

A permalink is the URL that people and search engines will use to link to posts or sections of your site or the links you send in an email pointing readers to your posts. Permalinks are often referred to as “pretty” URLs.

Permalinks make the web address pointing to each post on your website permanent, hence a permalink.

Why Do You Need To Use Permalinks?

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

WordPress is not only well optimized straight out of the box, but there are SEO plugins you can install that can help to enhance its SEO aspect further.

If you are looking to optimize the SEO aspect of your site, then you should not ignore the importance of its URLs. Google places considerable weight on the structure of a site’s URLs when indexing its site pages.

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

Now … let’s review the reason why you should configure your permalinks in WordPress.

Normally, a default WordPress installation uses a link-naming structure for your posts that isn’t search engine friendly and looks like this …

WordPress uses the above link structure to find data inside its database. It does not mean anything to visitors or search engines, and it doesn’t help your site with on-site SEO.

As the screenshot taken directly from Google search results below shows, many site owners haven’t set up their permalinks …

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

To get more SEO benefit from using 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 allows you to create a custom URL structure for your published posts, so your pages can easily go from something that is non-SEO friendly like this …

To something like this …

By default, WordPress URLs are not very SEO-friendly. This tutorial shows you how to configure your permalinks in WordPress to help your content rank better in search engines.

Changing WordPress Permalinks

From your WordPress administration menu, select 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 a “pretty” permalink instead for our posts. To do this, we will need to specify a different Permalink structure than the default one.

Common Settings

In the Common Settings section, select Custom Structure, then add one or more ‘tags’ (see below) to create search engine-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/europe-travel/ten-favourite-european-cruise-destinations

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=1792

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

Permalink Tags

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

• %year% – The year the post is published, displayed as four digits (e.g. ‘2011’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘09’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘11’)
• %hour% – The hour your post gets published (e.g. ‘11’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘42’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘45’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘5258’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of the 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 characters converted to lower case and no punctuation marks) in the URL. Tip: You can always edit the words in your post title 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 adding the /%postname%/ tag in ‘Custom Structure’.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

If you need to configure custom permalinks for your tag and category pages here is where you would do this.

This changes 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 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 section …

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

To this …

If you leave these fields blank WordPress uses the defaults.

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 – Tips

Use Descriptive Categories

To get the optimal SEO benefit out of using Permalinks, it’s important 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 Joost de Valk, here are a few things to consider if you are wondering whether you should add categories to your permalinks or not:

• If 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.
• 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 adding category vs no category there is no perfect permalink structure to use. Choose the permalink structure you think will suit your site best. Your post URLs should be short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We cover WordPress categories in other tutorials.

Make Your Content Timeless

Another tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your goal is to run a news blog or there is a special reason why you need to create dated website addresses, avoid using date-based permalink syntax when configuring your URLs.

(Avoid using URL structures that date your content)

Although setting up URL structures that time-stamp your content may be considered better that using no permalinks at all from an SEO aspect, people are less likely to click on a post if it is several years old, even if the content is relevant to the answers they are searching for.

Changing Your Permalink Structure In Site With Published Posts

Normally, your site’s permalinks should be configured when you perform a new WordPress installation. This should be part of your site 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 want to change the permalink structure, make sure that this is really something that needs doing, as doing so could create issues and errors.

Add 301 Redirection

As you’ve seen in the above screenshots of actual search results, many WordPress users (or whoever set up their site) seem to be completely unaware of the SEO-friendly URLs 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 website was configured to display post dates in your URLs and now all of your content is showing as being two or three years old and you want to delete the date portion in the URLs.

The best way to modify your permalink structure without negatively impacting your site’s SEO is to add ‘301 redirections’ to point links set up using the previous permalink syntax to web addresses that use the new permalink syntax.

Search engines interpret a code ‘301’ as a link that has permanently relocated to another destination. 301 redirects are the most efficient and search engine friendly way to redirect visitors to new web page destinations and avoid running into page errors when they click on an old link.

To create an effective permalink syntax change and avoid damaging your rankings, sending visitors to error pages, etc. you should set up your redirection system before messing with the permalink structure of your site.

You can WP site or blog using a redirection plugin like Simple 301 Redirects, or Redirection, or get a professional to help you set up and redirect your permalinks correctly to avoid issues and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up 301 redirects using a WordPress redirection plugin or get professional help)

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

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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