Wouldn’t it be great if after publishing a new post on your website or blog, the following could take place … all from your post address:

• New visitors could quickly understand what your post was about,
• Search engines would easily discover your post and correctly index the content for better search rankings,
• Each content item added to your website would have a unique identifier, making things easier to manage.

Well, with permalinks you can!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalink – What Is It?

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 web address that visitors and search engines use to link to your posts or sections of your site or the links you send in an email pointing readers to a particular item of content on your website. Permalinks are often called “pretty” URLs.

Permalinks make the URLs to each post on your blog permanent, hence a permalink.

Permalinks – Why Use Them?

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

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

If you focus on the SEO aspect of your site, then you cannot ignore the importance of your URLs. Search engines like Google place considerable weight on the structure of URLs when indexing its content.

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

Now … let’s turn our attention to why you may need to use permalinks when publishing content in WordPress.

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

The link structure shown above is used by WordPress to locate information within its database. It doesn’t really mean much to anyone, and it doesn’t help your site with on-site SEO.

As the screenshot below shows, many site owners are still using default settings when publishing content online …

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

To get optimal SEO benefit from using and improve your site’s rankings, 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 and archived posts, so your content 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 set up your WordPress permalinks to display your posts with SEO-friendly URLs instead of the out-of-the-box linking structure and help every new post you publish on your site or blog automatically get better indexing in search engines.

Setting Up Your WordPress Permalinks

Log into your WordPress admin and select 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 “pretty” permalink instead for our posts. To do this, we will need to specify a different Permalink structure than the default.

Common Settings – Permalinks

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

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=8201

(Using post name permalinks helps readers understand what the post is about)

Pretty URL Tags

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

• %year% – The year of the post, displayed as four digits (e.g. ‘2010’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘02’)
• %day% – The day your post gets published (e.g. ‘13’)
• %hour% – The hour your post is published (e.g. ‘02’)
• %minute% – The minute your post is published (e.g. ‘30’)
• %second% – The exact second the post is published (e.g. ‘39’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘2534’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted version of the post title. For example, if the post title is “Top Five Budget Travel Tips!”, the postname tag will convert this into “top-five-budget-travel-tips” (all lower case characters and removed punctuation symbol) in the URL. Tip: You can always edit this wording 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 choosing ‘Custom Structure’ and adding the /%postname%/ tag.

Optional Permalink Settings

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

This changes the ‘base’ tag or category URLs using the following structure:

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

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

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

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

To something like this …

If you leave the fields blank WordPress uses the defaults.

Remember to save any changes when finished …

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 more 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 and author of the WordPress SEO plugin Joost de Valk, here are some points to consider if you are wondering whether or not to add categories to your permalink structure:

• If your category is short and descriptive (e.g. uses a relevant keyword or keyword phrase), you may want to add categories 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 or copy and reduce the SEO benefit.
• If you are going 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 really 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 post URLs 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 goal is to run a news website or you have any special reason to create dated website URLs, it’s best to avoid using date-based permalink syntax for your blog’s URLs.

(Avoid setting up permalinks that date your posts)

Although using permalinks that time-stamp your posts may be considered better that using no permalinks at all from an SEO perspective, visitors are less likely to click on posts that are several years old, even if the content is relevant to what they are searching for.

What About An Established Blog?

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 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 absolutely necessary, as making changes to permalinks after your site has been running for a while could create SEO issues and loss of traffic.

301 Redirects

As you’ve seen in the above screenshots of actual search results, some WordPress site owners (or whoever set up their site) seem to be completely unaware of the permalinks feature of WordPress.

Maybe when you started out, your site used the default WordPress URL structure and now you want to improve your site’s SEO. Maybe your site was originally set up to display post dates in your web address and now all of your content is perceived as being outdated and you want to delete the date portion of the URLs.

To change your URL structure without impacting your site’s SEO in a negative way you should add ‘301 redirects’ to point links set up using the previous URL syntax to links that use the new permalinks structure.

A code ‘301’ is interpreted by search engines as a link that has been permanently moved elsewhere. 301 redirects are the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect visitors to new web page destinations and avoid ‘404’ (Page not found) errors when following an old link.

To effectively change your permalink syntax and avoid SEO problems, sending visitors to error pages, etc. you should set up your redirection system before messing with the permalink structure of your site.

You can site using a WP 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 URL redirections using a WP plugin or get professional assistance)

Congratulations! Now you know about the built-in system WordPress uses to display search engine-friendly URLs for your posts and improve your search search rankings. For additional information on using Permalinks, see the official WordPress documentation here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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