Wouldn’t it be great if you could publish content on your WordPress website, and the following happened … all from your page address:

• Potential visitors could easily gain an understanding of what your page was about,
• Google would find your posts faster,
• Each post published on your website or blog would have its own unique identifier, making things easier to manage.

Well, this is what permalinks let you do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

What Are Permalinks?

Permalinks are the permanent URLs to an individual post, category, or other taxonomy (a way to group things together) like archives.

A permalink is the URL that visitors and search engines will use to link to articles or sections of your site or the links you send in emails pointing readers to articles on your site. Permalinks are often called “pretty” URLs.

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

Permalinks – Why Use Them?

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

WordPress is not only well optimized right out of the box, but there are SEO plugins you can install that will help to finetune its SEO aspect considerably.

If you are looking to optimize the SEO aspect of your website, then you should not ignore the importance of your URLs. Search engines like Google tend to pay special attention to the structure of your site’s URLs when indexing site pages.

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

Now … let’s take a look at why it’s best to use permalinks when publishing content in WordPress.

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

WordPress uses the link structure with a string query shown above to find data within its database. It doesn’t really mean anything to either visitors or search engines, and it doesn’t help your website with on-site SEO.

As you can see from the screenshot image below taken directly from Google search listings, many WordPress users are still using out-of-the-box permalink settings when publishing content online …

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

To get the maximum SEO benefit from using and improve your site’s traffic results, you will want to make sure to configure your permalinks structure to make it more search engine-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 posts, so your pages can easily go from this …

To something like this …

By default, WordPress URLs are not very search engine-friendly. This tutorial shows you how to configure your permalinks in WordPress to display posts with SEO-friendly URLs.

How To Set Up Your WordPress Permalinks

Log into your WP admin and click on Settings > Permalinks …

This will bring 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 “pretty” permalink 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 search engine-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-europe/how-to-save-money-on-cruise-travel

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=160

(Using permalinks helps readers and search engines understand what the page is about)

Pretty Permalink Tags

“Pretty” URLs, 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. ‘2010’)
• %monthnum% – The month your post gets published (e.g. ‘05’)
• %day% – The day the post gets published (e.g. ‘23’)
• %hour% – The hour the post gets published (e.g. ‘13’)
• %minute% – The minute your post is published (e.g. ‘31’)
• %second% – The exact second the post gets published (e.g. ‘16’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘1945’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted 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 letters converted to lower case and exclamation symbols removed) in the URL. Tip: You can always edit the URL 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 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 ‘Custom Structure’.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

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

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

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

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

To something like this …

If you leave these fields blank WordPress uses the defaults.

Remember to save any 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 Info

Categories

To get the most SEO benefit out of 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 expert and author of the WordPress SEO plugin Joost de Valk, here are some things to keep in mind if you are wondering whether or not to add categories to your permalinks:

• If your category 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 copy 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.

Despite being the subject of intense debate in WordPress SEO circles, when it comes to category vs no category there is no ideal permalink structure to use. Use 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 cover WordPress categories in other articles.

Avoid Time-Specific URLs

Another tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your goal is to run a news site or you have a special reason to add dates to your URLs, avoid using date-based permalink settings when setting up your URLs.

(Avoid setting up permalinks that time-stamp your content)

Although setting up permalinks that date your content may be considered better that using no permalinks at all from an SEO aspect, visitors 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.

Changing Permalinks In Site With Published Posts

Normally, it’s best to configure your site’s permalinks when you install a new WordPress site. This should be part of your site planning process.

If your website is already established 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 making changes to permalinks after your site has been up and running for a while can create SEO issues and loss of traffic.

Use 301 Redirection

As you’ve seen earlier, many WordPress users (or their web developers) are completely unaware of the SEO-friendly URLs 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. Perhaps your website was originally set up to display post dates in your URLs and now all of your content is perceived as being outdated and you want to remove the date portion in the URLs.

The best way to edit your permalink structure without impacting your site’s SEO in a negative way is to add ‘301 redirects’ to point all links that use the old URL structure to URLs that use the new permalink structure.

Search engines interpret a ’301′ code as a link that has permanently moved elsewhere. 301 redirection is the most efficient and search engine friendly way to redirect users to new web page destinations and avoid running into page errors when clicking on an old link.

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

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

(Set up URL redirections using plugins or get professional help)

Congratulations! Now you know how to set up your permalinks to display search engine-friendly URLs for your posts and improve your search search rankings. To learn more about using Permalinks, see the WordPress codex below:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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