Wouldn’t it be great if you could simply add a new page to your WordPress website or blog, and the following happened … all from your page address:

• Readers could quickly glean what the post was about,
• Google would easily find your page and correctly classify your content to improve your search rankings,
• Every single content item published on your website or blog would have a unique identifier, making your content easier to manage.

Well, with permalinks this is really easy to do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

What’s A Permalink?

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

A permalink is the URL that other people will use to link to posts or sections of your site or the links you send in emails pointing to posts 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?

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

WordPress is not only great for SEO out of the box, but its SEO aspect can be further improved with excellent SEO plugins.

If you are looking to optimize the SEO aspect of your website, then you cannot ignore the importance of your site’s URLs. Google places considerable weight on the structure of URLs when indexing its pages.

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

Now … let’s take a look at why it’s best to set up permalinks in WordPress.

Typically, a default WordPress installation uses a non-search engine friendly URL-naming structure for your posts that looks like this …

WordPress uses the above link structure with a string query to locate information within its database. It does not help your website with on-site search engine optimization.

As the screenshot image below shows, many WordPress site owners are still using out of the box settings when publishing content …

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

To get the greatest 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 allows you to create a custom URL structure for your published and archived posts, so your pages can easily go from this …

To this …

In this tutorial, you will learn how to configure the Permalinks section of your WordPress site to display posts with search engine-friendly URLs instead of the default URL structure and help every new post you add automatically get better indexing results in Google.

Setting Up Your WordPress Permalinks

In your WordPress admin select, Settings > Permalinks …

This will bring 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 one.

Permalinks > 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-deals

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=9154

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

SEO-Friendly 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. ‘2012’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘02’)
• %day% – The day the post is published (e.g. ‘08’)
• %hour% – The hour the post is published (e.g. ‘14’)
• %minute% – The minute the post is published (e.g. ‘41’)
• %second% – The exact second your post gets published (e.g. ‘04’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘7240’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of your 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 punctuation marks deleted) in the URL. Tip: You can edit the URL text 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 the ‘Custom Structure’ option and using the /%postname%/ tag.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

In this section, you can enter custom structures for your category and tag page URLs.

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

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

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

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 fields blank the defaults will be used.

Remember to save your changes when you have 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 – Additional Information

Use Short, Descriptive Categories

To get greater 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 Joost de Valk, here are a few things to consider 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 use categories 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 decrease 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 we recommend not using the category tag in your permalink structure.

Ultimately, when it comes to adding category vs no category there is no perfect permalink structure to use. Use the permalink structure you think will suit your needs best. Your post URLs should be short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We provide detailed information about WordPress categories in another tutorial.

Don’t Use Date Permalinks

Another tip from Joost de Valk is that unless you run a news site or there is a special reason why you need to add dates to your post URLs, it’s best to avoid selecting date-based permalink syntax for your URLs.

(Avoid setting up permalinks that date your posts)

Although using URL structures that time-stamp your posts 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 Blogs With Indexed Posts?

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

If your website has been running for a while or your site already has many posts indexed in the search engines and you want to change the permalink structure, make sure that this is something that absolutely needs doing, as doing so can create issues and errors.

301 Redirection

As you’ve seen in the above screenshots of actual search results, many website owners (or their web developers) seem to be unaware of the SEO-friendly URLs feature of WordPress.

Maybe you started out using the default WordPress permalinks and now you want to optimize your site better for search engines. Perhaps your website was configured to display post dates in your URLs and now all of your content is perceived as being outdated and you want to delete the date tags of the URLs.

The best way to edit your permalink structure without impacting your site’s SEO or existing rankings in a negative way is to add ‘301 redirections’ to point all links using the previous permalinks structure to web URLs using the new structure.

A code ‘301’ is interpreted by search engines as a link that has permanently moved elsewhere. 301 redirection is the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect visitors to new site destinations and avoid page errors when following an old link.

To effectively change your syntax and avoid damaging your rankings, sending visitors to error pages, etc. you will need to add your redirection system before changing the permalink structure of your site.

You can WP site or blog using plugins like Simple 301 Redirects, or Redirection, or get a professional to help you set up and redirect your permalinks correctly to avoid problems and troubleshoot any errors.

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

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

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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