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

• Potential visitors to your site could tell what your content is about,
• Search engines would be able to discover your posts faster,
• Every single item of content added to your website would have its own unique identifier, making your content easier to manage.

Well, with WordPress permalinks this can easily be done!

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 URL that other people use to link to your articles or sections of your site or the links you send in an email pointing readers to your posts. Permalinks are often called “pretty” URLs.

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

Why Do You Need To Use Permalinks?

As you probably know, WordPress is one of the best CMS tools available when it comes to publishing search engines optimized content.

WordPress is not only well optimized right out of the box, but the SEO aspect can be easily improved with SEO plugins.

If you are looking to optimize the SEO aspect of your site, then you cannot ignore the importance of your URLs. Google tends to give special consideration to the URL structure of your site.

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

Now … let’s see why it’s best to use permalinks when publishing content in WordPress.

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

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

As you can see from the screenshot below, many site owners haven’t yet configured their permalinks …

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

To get more SEO benefit out of using WordPress and improve your site’s rankings, you should set up your permalinks structure to make it more SEO-friendly by displaying relevant keywords in your URL, instead of meaningless numbers and symbols.

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 with an SEO-friendly URL like this …

In this step-by-step tutorial, you will learn how to set up your WordPress permalinks to display posts using SEO-friendly URLs instead of the out-of-the-box URL structure and help every new post you publish on your site or blog get better indexing in Google.

Configuring Your WordPress Permalinks

From your WordPress administration menu, 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 “pretty” permalinks 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 SEO-friendly URLs …

(Set up 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/travel-tips/cruise-holiday-bargains

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=3782

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

How To Create 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, displayed as four digits (e.g. ‘2012’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘08’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘10’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘24’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘38’)
• %second% – The exact second the post gets published (e.g. ‘31’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘534’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of the post title. For example, if your 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 punctuation symbols deleted) in the URL. Tip: You can always edit the words 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 adding the /%postname%/ tag.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

This section lets you configure custom structures for your category and tag archive 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 make your category links display as ‘http://domain.com/recipes/category_name/’.

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

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

To this …

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

Remember to save any 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 – Additional Info

Use Descriptive Categories

To get the most 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 a few points to keep in mind if you are wondering whether or not to add categories to your permalinks:

• If your domain is short and your category name 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 copy or share and decrease the SEO benefit.
• Do you plan to post content under only one category or multiple categories? If you plan to post content under multiple categories, then we recommend not using the category tag in your permalink structure.

Ultimately, when it comes to using category vs no category there is no perfect permalink structure to use. We recommend choosing the permalink structure you think will suit your site 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 tutorials.

Make Your Content Timeless

Another great tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your goal is to run a news blog or you have any special reason to date your site’s content, it’s best to avoid selecting date-based permalink options when setting up your blog’s URLs.

(Avoid setting up URL structures that time-stamp 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.

Changing Permalinks In Blog With Published Posts

Normally, your permalinks should be configured when you first install WordPress. This should be part of your website planning process.

If your website is already established or your site already has many posts indexed in the search engines and you would like to change the permalink structure, make sure that this is really something that needs doing, as doing so could create SEO issues and errors.

Add 301 Redirection

As you’ve seen in the above screenshots of actual search results, many WordPress site owners (or their web developers) are completely unaware of the permalinks feature of WordPress.

Maybe when you started, your site used the default WordPress permalinks and now you would like to improve your site’s SEO. Maybe your website was configured 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 delete the date portion in the permalinks.

To edit your permalinks without negatively affecting your site’s SEO you should add ‘301 redirects’ to reassign all links that use the old URL syntax to links using the new structure.

Search engines interpret a code ‘301’ as a link that has been permanently moved. 301 redirects are the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect visitors to new site destinations and avoid running into page errors if clicking on an old link.

To effectively change your syntax and avoid damaging your search rankings, 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 site or blog using WordPress 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 issues and troubleshoot any errors.

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

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

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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