Wouldn’t it be great if after publishing content on your WordPress website, the following happened … all from your page address:

• New visitors could gain an understanding of what your post was about,
• Google would easily find your posts and correctly classify their content for better search results,
• Every piece of content you create on your site would have a unique ID, making your content easier to manage.

Well, with WordPress permalinks you can easily do this!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – Definition

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 use to link to articles or sections of your site or the links you send in an email pointing to articles on your site. Permalinks are often called “pretty” URLs.

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

Why Use Permalinks?

As you are probably aware, WordPress is one of the best CMS tools you can use when it comes to publishing search optimized content.

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 fine tuned its SEO aspect.

If you are looking to optimize the SEO aspect of your site or blog, then you cannot ignore the importance of its URLs. Search engines like Google tend to give special consideration to the URL structure of your site.

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

Now … let’s take a look at the reason why you should set up permalinks if publishing content 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 link structure shown above to locate information inside its database. It does not mean anything to either search engines or visitors, and it doesn’t help your site with on-site SEO.

As the screenshot image taken directly from Google search listings below shows, many site owners haven’t yet configured their sites to publish search optimized content online …

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

To get the best possible SEO benefit from using WordPress and improve your site’s rankings, 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 lets you create a custom URL structure for your published and archived posts, so your pages can go from something that is non-SEO friendly like this …

To something like this …

In this step-by-step tutorial, you will learn how to configure the Permalinks section of your WordPress site to display posts using search engine-friendly URLs instead of the default URL structure and help every new post you publish get better indexing in search engines like Google.

Configuring WordPress Permalinks

In your WordPress dashboard menu, click on Settings > Permalinks …

This brings 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 “pretty” permalinks 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 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/cruise-travel/romantic-cruise-holiday-bargains

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=7391

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

Creating Permalink Tags

“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. ‘2016’)
• %monthnum% – The month the post is published (e.g. ‘06’)
• %day% – The day the post gets published (e.g. ‘17’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘11’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘50’)
• %second% – The exact second your post gets published (e.g. ‘11’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘5996’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted version of the 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 lower case letters and no punctuation marks) in the URL. Tip: You can edit the wording in your post titles 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 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 ‘Custom Structure’ and using the /%postname%/ tag.

Optional Permalink Settings

If you need to set up custom structures for your tag and category archive page URLs you can do this in this section.

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, changing your category base to “topics” will display your category links as ‘http://domain.com/topics/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 optional settings fields blank the default settings will be used.

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 Notes

Use Descriptive Categories

To get the greatest 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 Joost de Valk, here are some points to consider if you are wondering whether you should add categories to your permalinks or not:

• If your category name is short and descriptive (e.g. adds a relevant keyword or keyword phrase to your URL), 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 share and reduce 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.

Ultimately, when it comes to adding category vs no category there is no ”better” permalink structure to use. Use the permalink structure 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 articles.

Create Timeless Posts

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

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

Although setting up URL structures that date your content is better that using no permalinks at all from an SEO aspect, 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 Sites With Published Posts?

Normally, your permalinks should be set up when you perform a new WordPress installation. This should be part of your site planning process.

If your website has been running for a while or you have a lot of content already 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 doing so can create SEO issues and errors.

301 Redirection

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

Maybe when you started out, your site used the default WordPress permalinks and now you would like to improve your SEO. Perhaps your site was originally set up to display post dates in your web address and now all of your content is showing as being two or three years old and you want to remove the date portion of the URLs.

The best way to edit your permalink structure without affecting your site’s SEO in a negative way is to use ‘301 redirects’ to point all links that were set up using the old permalinks syntax to page URLs using the new structure.

Search engines interpret a code ‘301’ 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 ”page not found” errors if clicking on an old link.

To create an effective permalink structure change and avoid SEO problems, sending visitors to error pages, etc. you should install and set up your redirection system before changing the permalink structure of your site.

You can add a link redirection system to your do this using a plugin 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 link redirection system for your changed permalinks using plugins or get professional help)

Congratulations! Now you know how to configure your WordPress permalinks to display SEO-friendly URLs for your posts and improve your search search rankings. To learn more about using Permalinks, see the WordPress codex below:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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