Wouldn’t it be great if after publishing a new page on your website or blog, the following happened … just from your page URL:

• Site visitors could tell what the content is about,
• Search engines would easily find your post and correctly index your content for better search results,
• Each piece of content you create on your website or blog would have its own unique ID, making things easier to manage.

Well, this is what a permalink lets you do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

What Are Permalinks?

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

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

Permalinks – Why Use Them?

Hopefully, you are probably aware that, WordPress is one of the best CMS tools available when it comes to SEO.

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

If you focus on the SEO aspect of your site or blog, then you should not ignore the importance of its site’s URLs. Search engines like Google tend to pay special attention to the URL structure of your 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 turn our attention to the reason why it’s best to use permalinks 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 does not mean anything to either visitors or search engines, and it doesn’t help your website with on-site search engine optimization.

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

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

To get the most SEO benefit from using WordPress and improve your site’s traffic results, you should configure 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 posts, so your pages can go from something that is non-SEO friendly like this …

To something like this …

By default, WordPress post URLs are not very SEO-friendly. In this step-by-step tutorial, you will learn how to configure your permalinks in WordPress to display posts with SEO-friendly URLs.

Configuring Your WordPress Permalinks

In your WordPress admin 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 a search engine friendly URL 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/how-to-save-money-on-cruise-travel

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=4596

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

Adding Pretty URL 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, displayed as four digits (e.g. ‘2015’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘12’)
• %day% – The day your post is published (e.g. ‘17’)
• %hour% – The hour your post is published (e.g. ‘10’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘11’)
• %second% – The exact second your post is published (e.g. ‘30’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘1846’)
• %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 lower case characters and removed punctuation marks) in the URL. Tip: You can always 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 choosing the ‘Custom Structure’ option and using the /%postname%/ tag.

Optional Permalink Settings

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

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

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

For example, using “topics” as your category base will make your category links display as ‘http://domain.com/topics/uncategorized/’.

So, if you enter the following in your permalinks Optional > Category base settings field …

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

To this …

If you leave the optional settings fields blank WordPress uses the defaults.

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 Information

Categories

To get the most 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 expert Joost de Valk, here are some things to keep in mind if you are wondering whether or not to add categories to your permalink structure:

• 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 or copy and reduce the SEO benefit.
• 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 category vs no category there is no ideal permalink structure to use. We recommend choosing the permalink structure you think will suit your needs best and that will make your web address short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We provide detailed information about WordPress categories in another article.

Avoid Using Permalinks That Time-Stamp Your Posts

Another tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your site is a news site or there is a special reason why you need to add dates to your URLs, avoid selecting date-based permalink options when setting up your blog’s URLs.

(Avoid setting up URL structures that date your content)

People are less likely to click on a post that is a couple of years old, even if the content is relevant to what they are searching for.

What If My Blog Has Published Content?

Normally, your site’s permalinks should be configured when you first install WordPress. 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 could create SEO issues and errors.

301 Redirects

As you’ve seen in the above screenshots of actual search results, some WordPress users (or their web developers) are completely unaware of the SEO-friendly URLs feature of WordPress.

Maybe when you started out, your site used the default WordPress permalinks and now you want to improve your site’s SEO. Maybe your site was configured to display post dates in your web address and now all of your content is showing as being 2-3 years old and you want to delete the date tags of the permalinks.

The best way to edit your permalink structure without negatively impacting your site’s SEO is to add ‘301 redirections’ to reassign all links that use the old permalinks structure to page URLs that use the new permalinks structure.

Search engines interpret a ’301′ code as a link that has permanently relocated to another destination. 301 redirection is the most efficient and search engine friendly way to redirect visitors to new web page destinations and avoid running into page errors if following an old link.

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

You can add a link redirection system to your site using plugins like Simple 301 Redirects, or Redirection, or get a professional to assist you with setting up and redirecting your permalinks correctly to avoid issues and troubleshoot any errors.

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

Congratulations! Now you know about the built-in system WordPress uses to display SEO-friendly URLs for your posts and improve your search results. To learn more about using Permalinks, see the official WordPress documentation below:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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