Wouldn’t it be great if you could simply publish a new post on your website, and the following took place … just from your URL:

• New visitors could quickly assess what the page was about,
• Google would find your posts faster,
• Every content item created on your website or blog would have its own unique identifier, making things easier to manage.

Well, this is what WordPress permalinks let you do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – Definition

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 visitors and search engines use to link to your posts or sections of your site or the links you send in an email pointing to articles on your site. Permalinks are often referred to as “pretty” URLs.

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

Permalinks – Why Do I Need To Use Them?

As you probably know, WordPress is one of the best Content Management Systems 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 easily enhanced with excellent SEO plugins.

If you focus on the SEO aspect of your site, then you cannot ignore the importance of its URLs. Search engines like Google place considerable weight on the structure of a site’s URLs when indexing content.

Permalinks are 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 see why you should configure your permalinks in WordPress.

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

The link structure shown above is used by WordPress to locate information inside its database. It does not mean much to anyone, and it doesn’t help your website with on-site SEO.

As you can see from the screenshot image below taken from Google search results, many WordPress site owners have not yet set up their permalinks …

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

To get the most SEO benefit from using and improve your site’s rankings, you should configure 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 go from something that is non-SEO friendly like this …

To something like this …

By default, WordPress post URLs are not very search engine-friendly. This step-by-step tutorial explains how to configure your WordPress permalinks to help your content rank better in Google.

Changing WordPress Permalinks

In your WordPress main menu, 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 search engine friendly URL instead for our posts. To do this, we will need to specify a different Permalink structure than the default.

Common Settings

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

(Change 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/europe-travel/river-cruise-holiday-bargains

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=8506

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

Using Permalink Tags

“Pretty” URLs, or search engine-friendly URLs, are created by adding one or more ‘tags’ in the Custom Structure field:

• %year% – The year the post is published, four digits (e.g. ‘2013’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘10’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘24’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘15’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘09’)
• %second% – The exact second the post is published (e.g. ‘46’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘4504’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted version of the post title. For example, if the post title is ”It Ain’t Worth Doin’ No More!”, the postname tag will convert this into “it-aint-worth-doin-no-more” (all characters converted to lower case and no exclamation marks) in the URL. Tip: You can 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 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’.

Optional Permalink Settings

If you need to configure custom permalinks for your category and tag page URLs here is where you would do this.

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, changing your category base to “travel” would make your category links display as ‘http://domain.com/travel/category_name/’.

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

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

To something like this …

If you leave these fields blank WordPress uses the defaults.

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 – Tips

Set Up Your Categories

To get the best benefit out of using Permalinks, remember 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 plugin developer Joost de Valk, here are some things to consider if you are wondering whether or not to add categories to your permalinks:

• If your domain is short and your category is short and descriptive (e.g. uses a relevant keyword or keyword phrase), 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 share or copy and decrease the SEO benefit.
• If you are going 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 adding 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 more information about WordPress categories in other articles.

Make Your Posts Timeless

Another great tip from Joost de Valk is that unless you plan to run a news website or you have a special reason to create dated website addresses, it’s best to avoid selecting date-based permalink settings when configuring your blog’s URLs.

(Avoid setting up permalinks that date your posts)

Although setting up permalinks that time-stamp your content may be considered better that using no permalinks at all from an SEO perspective, people are less likely to click on a post that is several years old, even if the content is relevant to the answers they are searching for.

What If My Blog Has Lots Of Published Posts?

Normally, it’s best to configure your site’s permalinks when you perform a new WordPress installation. 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 want to change the permalink structure, make sure that this is absolutely something that needs to be done, as changing permalinks after your site has been going for a while could create SEO issues and errors.

Use 301 Redirects

As you’ve seen in the above screenshots of actual search results, some site owners (or whoever set up their site) are completely 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 originally set up to display post dates in your web address and now all of your posts are showing as being old and you want to delete the date tags in your permalinks.

The best way to edit your permalinks without negatively impacting your site’s SEO or rankings is to add ‘301 redirects’ to reassign links set up using the previous permalink syntax to page URLs that use the new syntax.

A ’301′ code is interpreted by search engines as a link that has permanently moved. 301 redirects are the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect users to new site destinations and avoid ”page not found” errors when following an old link.

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

You can add a link redirection system to your site or blog using redirection plugins like Simple 301 Redirects, or Redirection, or use the services of a professional to assist you with setting up and redirecting your permalinks correctly to avoid problems and troubleshoot any errors.

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

Congratulations! Now you know about the built-in system WordPress uses to display SEO-friendly URLs for your posts. For additional information on using Permalinks, refer to the WordPress codex here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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