Wouldn’t it be great if you could just add a new post to your site, and the following happened … just from your page URL:

• Site visitors could tell what the post is about,
• Search engines would be able to easily discover your page and correctly index its content for better search results,
• Each content item on your website or blog would have a unique identifier, making things easier to manage.

Well, this is what permalinks let you do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

What Is A Permalink?

Permalinks are the permanent URLs to your individual WordPress posts, categories and other taxonomies (a way to group things together) like archives.

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

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

Why Use Permalinks?

As you have probably heard by now, WordPress is one of the best Content Management Systems available when it comes to SEO.

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

If you focus on the SEO aspect of your website, then you should not ignore the importance of its URLs. Google places considerable weight on the structure of your site’s URLs when indexing its content.

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 usability, aesthetics, and forward-compatibility of your links.

Now … let’s take a look at the reason why you should configure your permalinks in WordPress.

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

The link structure shown above is used by WordPress to find information inside its database. It does not mean anything to either visitors or search engines, and it doesn’t help your website with on-site SEO.

As the screenshot image taken directly from Google search results below shows, many site owners are still using out-of-the-box permalink settings when publishing content online …

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

To get maximum SEO benefit out of 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 characters.

WordPress allows you to create a custom URL structure for your published posts, so your pages can easily go from this …

To this …

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

Configuring Your WordPress Permalinks

In your WordPress admin click on, 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 search engine friendly URL instead for our posts. To do this, we will need to specify a different Permalink structure than the 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 …

(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=24

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

How To Create Permalink Tags In WordPress

“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, four digits (e.g. ‘2015’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘03’)
• %day% – The day the post gets published (e.g. ‘31’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘02’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘08’)
• %second% – The exact second your post gets published (e.g. ‘45’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘3046’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted version of your post title. For example, if your post title is ”The Five Don’ts Of DIY Home Repair!”, the postname tag will convert this into “the-five-donts-of-diy-home-repair” (all letters converted to lower case and punctuation symbols removed) 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 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 correctly formatted 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 permalinks for your category and tag URLs you can do this in this section.

This changes the ‘base’ category or tag 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” would display your category links 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 looking like this …

To 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 – Additional Notes

Set Up Categories

To get the best possible benefit out of using Permalinks, it’s important 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 some points to consider if you are wondering whether or not to add categories to your permalinks:

• If your category 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 copy or share and reduce the SEO benefit.
• 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.

Ultimately, when it comes to category vs no category there is no ideal 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 detailed information about WordPress categories in other articles.

Make Your Content Timeless

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

(Avoid setting up permalinks that date your content)

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 Established Blogs?

Normally, your permalinks should be configured when you install a new WordPress site. 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 to be done, as changing permalinks after your site has already been going for a while can create SEO issues and loss of traffic.

301 Redirection

As you’ve seen earlier, many website 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 URL structure and now you want to improve your SEO. Maybe your site was configured to display post dates in your web address and now all of your content is perceived as being out-of-date and you want to delete the date tags of your permalinks.

To modify your URL structure without impacting your site’s SEO in a negative way you will need to add ‘301 redirects’ to reassign links that were set up using the previous permalink structure to destinations using the new structure.

A ’301′ code is interpreted by search engines as a link that has permanently been moved to another location. 301 redirects are the most efficient and search engine friendly way to redirect users to new website destinations and avoid running into ”page not found” errors when clicking on an old link.

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

You can add a link redirection system to your do this using a 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 problems and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up URL redirections using a WP plugin or use the services of a professional)

Congratulations! Now you know how to change your WordPress site or blog to display SEO-friendly URLs for your posts. For additional information on using Permalinks, see the WordPress codex below:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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