Wouldn’t it be great if after publishing new content on your site, the following took place … all from your page address:

• Visitors could understand what the post was about,
• Google would easily find your page and correctly classify the content to improve your search rankings,
• Each post published on your website or blog would have its own unique ID, making things easier to manage.

Well, this is what a WordPress permalink lets you do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

What’s A Permalink?

Permalinks are the permanent URLs to your individual 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 posts or sections of your site or the links you send in an email pointing to posts on your site. Permalinks are often called “pretty” URLs.

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

Why Do You Need To Use Permalinks?

Hopefully, you are probably aware that, WordPress is one of the best Content Management Systems available when it comes to SEO.

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

If you focus on the SEO aspect of your site, then you cannot ignore the importance of your URLs. Google places considerable weight on the URL structure of a site.

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

Now … let’s see why you should configure your permalinks when publishing content in WordPress.

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

The above link structure is used by WordPress to locate data inside its database. It doesn’t really help your site with on-site SEO.

As you can see from the image below, many WordPress site owners are still using default settings when publishing their content online …

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

To get the greatest SEO benefit out of using and improve your site’s rankings, you will want to make sure to set up 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 and archived posts, so your content can easily 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 your posts with SEO-friendly URLs instead of the default URL structure and help every new post you add to your site or blog get better indexing results in search engines.

Configuring WordPress Permalinks

In your WordPress dashboard click on, 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 a “pretty” permalink instead for our posts. To do this, we will need to specify a different Permalink structure than the default.

Common Settings – Permalinks

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 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/budget-travel/how-to-save-money-on-cruise-travel

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=4024

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

SEO-Friendly 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, displayed as four digits (e.g. ‘2015’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘04’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘06’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘13’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘34’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘58’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘4693’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted 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 characters converted to lower case and exclamation marks deleted) 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 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 selecting the ‘Custom Structure’ setting and adding the /%postname%/ tag.

Optional Permalink Settings

In this section, you can set custom structures for your category and tag pages.

This changes the ‘base’ category or tag 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 will display your category links as ‘http://domain.com/recipes/category_name/’.

So, if you add the following to your permalinks Optional > Category base settings field …

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

To something like this …

If you leave these 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 – Tips

Categories

To get the maximum 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 expert and author of the WordPress SEO plugin Joost de Valk, here are some points to consider if you are wondering whether or not to add categories to your permalink structure:

• If your domain is short and your category slug is short and descriptive (e.g. adds a relevant keyword or keyword phrase to your URL), 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 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.

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

Avoid Using Date-Based URLs

Another useful tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your site provides news or time-specific information, or you have a special reason to create dated post addresses, it’s best to avoid using date-based permalink syntax when setting up your blog’s URLs.

(Avoid using URL structures that date your content)

Although setting up permalinks that date your content is better that using no permalinks at all from an SEO aspect, people are less likely to click on a post that is several years old, even if the content is relevant to what they are searching for.

Changing Your Permalink Structure In An Established Blog

Normally, it’s best to set up your permalinks when you first install WordPress. This should be part of your website planning process.

If your website has been running for a while or your site already has a lot of posts indexed in the search engines and you want to change the permalink structure, make sure that this is really necessary, as making changes to permalinks after your site has been up and running for a while could create issues and loss of traffic.

301 Redirection

As you’ve seen in earlier screenshots, some WordPress users (or whoever set up their site) are completely unaware of the search-friendly URLs feature of WordPress.

Maybe when you started out, your site used the default WordPress URL structure and now you want to improve your SEO. Maybe your website was originally set up 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 edit your permalinks without negatively affecting your site’s SEO you should add ‘301 redirections’ to reassign links using the old permalinks syntax to destinations using the new structure.

A code ‘301’ 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 visitors to new site destinations and avoid ”page not found” errors if following an old link.

To effectively change your syntax and avoid SEO problems, sending visitors to error pages, etc. you should install and set up your redirection system before messing with the permalink structure of your site.

You can add a link redirection system to your do this using plugins like Simple 301 Redirects, or Redirection, or get a professional to help you set up and redirect your permalinks correctly to avoid issues and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up 301 redirects using a WordPress redirection plugin or get professional assistance)

Congratulations! Now you know how to configure your WordPress permalinks to display SEO-friendly URLs for your posts and improve your search search rankings. For additional information on using Permalinks, refer to the WordPress codex here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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