Wouldn’t it be great if after publishing new content on your WordPress website or blog, the following could happen … all from your post URL:

• New visitors could quickly determine what your page is about,
• Google would easily find your post and correctly index your content to improve your search results,
• Each post you create on your website would have its own unique identifier, making your content easier to manage.

Well, this is what permalinks let you do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

What Are Permalinks?

A permalink is the permanent URL to an individual WordPress post, category, or other taxonomy (a way to organize things together) like archives.

A permalink is the URL that people and search engines 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 URLs to each post on your blog permanent, hence a perma-link.

Why Use Permalinks?

Hopefully, you probably know by now that, 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 the SEO aspect can be further finetuned with excellent SEO plugins.

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

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

Now … let’s review why you may need to configure your permalinks in WordPress.

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

WordPress uses the link with a string query shown above to locate information inside your database. It does not mean much to anyone, and it doesn’t help your website with on-site search engine optimization.

As you can see from the screenshot image below, many WordPress users have not yet set up their sites to use permalinks …

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

To get the most SEO benefit from using and improve your site’s traffic results, you should set up your permalinks structure to make it more search engine-friendly by displaying relevant keywords in your URL, instead of meaningless numbers and symbols.

WordPress offers the ability to create a custom URL structure for your published posts, so your content can go from something that is non-SEO friendly like this …

To something like this …

In this tutorial, you will learn how to set up the Permalinks section of your WordPress site to display your posts with SEO-friendly URLs instead of the out-of-the-box URL structure and help every new post you add get better indexing in Google.

Changing Your WordPress Permalinks

In your WordPress admin select, 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 one set by default.

Common Permalink Settings

In the Common Settings section, select Custom Structure, then add one or more ‘tags’ (see below) to create search engine-friendly URLs …

(Configure 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/travel-europe/seven-best-european-river-cruise-destinations

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=3973

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

Pretty Permalink 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, four digits (e.g. ‘2011’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘01’)
• %day% – The day the post gets published (e.g. ‘05’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘13’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘52’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘54’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘7941’)
• %postname% – A sanitized 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 letters and exclamation symbol deleted) in the URL. Tip: You can 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 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 adding the /%postname%/ tag in the ‘Custom Structure’ option.

Optional Permalink Settings

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

You can change the ‘base’ category or tag of your 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 would make your category links display as ‘http://domain.com/topics/uncategorized/’.

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 something like this …

If you leave the fields blank the default settings will be used.

Remember to save your 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 the greatest benefit from using Permalinks, you will need 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 plugin developer 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 domain is short and your category is short and descriptive (e.g. adds a relevant keyword or keyword phrase to your URL), you may want to add the category tag 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 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 using category vs no category there is no ideal 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 provide more information about WordPress categories in other articles.

Avoid Time-Specific Permalink Syntax

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

(Avoid using permalinks that time-stamp your content)

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 If My Blog Has Lots Of Content?

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

If your website is already established 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 already been up and running for a while can create SEO issues and errors.

Use 301 Redirection

As you’ve seen earlier, many site owners (or whoever set up their site) are unaware of the SEO-friendly URLs feature of WordPress.

Maybe you started out using the default WordPress permalinks and now you want to improve your site’s SEO. Perhaps your website was configured to display post dates in your URLs and now all of your content is perceived as being out-of-date and you want to delete the date portion in the permalinks.

To change your URL structure without negatively affecting your site’s SEO you should use ‘301 redirects’ to point all links that use the previous permalink structure to URLs that use the new syntax.

A code ‘301’ is interpreted by search engines as a link that has permanently been moved to another destination. 301 redirection is the most efficient and search engine friendly way to redirect users to new site destinations and avoid running into page errors if clicking on an old link.

To effectively change your permalink structure and avoid SEO problems, sending visitors to broken links, etc. you should set up your redirection system before changing the permalink structure of your site.

You can site using a WP 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 issues and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up 301 redirects using redirection plugins or use the services of a professional)

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

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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