Wouldn’t it be great if you could just publish a new post on your WordPress website, and the following would then happen … all from your post URL:

• Readers could understand what your post was about,
• Search engines would be able to find your posts faster,
• Each item of content added to your website would have a 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 your individual posts, categories and other taxonomies (a way to organize things together) like archives.

A permalink is the URL that visitors and search engines use to link to your articles or sections of your site or the links you send in an email pointing to a particular item of content on your blog. Permalinks are often called “pretty” URLs.

Permalinks make the URLs to each post on your site permanent, hence a perma-link.

Why Do You Need To Use Permalinks?

Hopefully, you are probably aware by now that, WordPress is one of the best CMS tools available when it comes to SEO.

WordPress is not only well optimized right out of the box, but its SEO aspect can be considerably fine tuned using excellent SEO plugins.

If you focus on the SEO aspect of your site or blog, then you cannot ignore the importance of its URLs. Search engines like Google place considerable weight on the URL structure of your site.

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

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

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

WordPress uses the link structure shown above to find data inside its database. It doesn’t really mean much to anyone, and it doesn’t help your website with on-site SEO.

As you can see from the screenshot below taken directly from Google search results, many WordPress users haven’t configured their sites to use permalinks …

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

To get greater SEO benefit out of using and improve your site’s traffic results, you will want to make sure to 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 gives you the ability to create a custom URL structure for your published and archived posts, so your pages can easily go from this …

To something like this …

By default, WordPress post URLs are not very SEO-friendly. This tutorial explains how to configure your WordPress permalinks to automatically get better indexing results in Google.

Setting Up WordPress Permalinks

In your WordPress dashboard menu, select Settings > Permalinks …

This brings 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 search engine friendly URL instead for our posts. To do this, we need to specify a different Permalink structure than the one set by default.

Permalinks - Common Settings

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

(Change 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-deals/how-to-save-money-on-cruise-travel

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=3268

(Using permalinks helps visitors understand what the post is about)

How To Use Permalink Tags

“Pretty” permalinks, or search engine-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. ‘07’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘20’)
• %hour% – The hour your post is published (e.g. ‘13’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘33’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘18’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘1735’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of the post title. For example, if your post title is ”It Ain’t Worth Doin’ No More!”, the postname tag will convert this into “it-aint-worth-doin-no-more” (all letters converted to lower case and exclamation symbols deleted) in the URL. Tip: You can edit the wording in your post titles 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 choosing ‘Custom Structure’ and adding the /%postname%/ tag.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

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

This changes the ‘base’ tag or category URLs using the following syntax:

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

For example, using “travel” as your category base will display your category links as ‘http://domain.com/travel/uncategorized/’.

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

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

To this …

If you leave the fields blank the default settings will be used.

Remember to save any changes when 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 greatest 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 Joost de Valk, here are a few points to consider if you are wondering whether you should add categories to your permalink structure or not:

• If your domain is short and your category slug is short and descriptive (e.g. uses a relevant keyword or keyword phrase), 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 copy and reduce the SEO benefit.
• If you are going 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 using category vs no category there really is no ideal permalink structure to use. Use a permalink structure you think will suit your site best. Your web addresses should be short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We provide more information about WordPress categories in another article.

Make Your Posts Timeless

Another useful tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your aim is to run a news blog or you have a special reason to add dates to your post URLs, it’s best to avoid choosing date-based permalink settings when setting up your blog’s URLs.

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

Although using permalinks that date your posts is better that using no permalinks at all from an SEO point-of-view, visitors are less likely to click on a post that is a couple of years old, even if the content is relevant to the answers they are searching for.

What If My Blog Has Indexed Content?

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 site 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 really something that needs doing, as doing so could create issues and errors.

301 Redirects

As you’ve seen in earlier screenshots, some WordPress users (or their web developers) are unaware of the permalinks feature of WordPress.

Maybe when you started out, your site used the default WordPress permalinks and now you want to optimize your site better for search engines. Maybe your site was originally set up to display post dates in your URLs and now all of your content is showing as being 2-3 years old and you want to delete the date tags of your permalinks.

The best way to modify your permalinks without negatively affecting your site’s SEO is to add ‘301 redirections’ to reassign links that use the previous permalink structure to post URLs that use the new permalinks syntax.

A code ‘301’ is interpreted by search engines as a link that has been permanently relocated to another address. 301 redirects are the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect users to new web page destinations and avoid running into ‘404’ (Page not found) errors when clicking on an old link.

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

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

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

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

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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