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

• Potential visitors could easily assess what the post was about,
• Search engines would be able to easily discover your posts and correctly index their content to improve your search results,
• Every content item you create on your site would have a unique ID, making your site easier to manage.

Well, this is what permalinks let 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 organize things together) like archives.

A permalink is the web address that others use to link to your posts or sections of your site or the links you send in an email pointing to your posts. Some people refer to permalinks as “pretty” URLs.

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

Permalinks – Why Use Them?

As you are probably aware, 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 there are excellent SEO plugins you can install that can help to finetune its SEO aspect further.

If you are looking to optimize the SEO aspect of your site or blog, then you cannot ignore the importance of your URLs. Search engines like Google tend to give special consideration to the structure of URLs when indexing site pages.

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

Now … let’s turn our attention to why you should set up permalinks when publishing content in WordPress.

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

WordPress uses the link structure shown above to find information within your database. It does not mean anything to visitors or search engines, and it doesn’t help your website with on-site SEO.

As the screenshot image taken from Google search results below shows, many site owners haven’t set up their sites to use permalinks …

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

To get greater SEO benefit from using WordPress and improve your site’s traffic results, you should set up your permalinks structure to make it more search engine-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 posts, so your pages can easily go from something that is non-SEO friendly like this …

To something with an SEO-friendly URL like this …

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

Changing Your WordPress Permalinks

From your WordPress admin menu, 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 Settings

In the Common Settings section, select Custom Structure, then add one or more ‘tags’ (see below) to create SEO-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/travel-deals/top-european-cruise-destinations

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=3487

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

Creating 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 of the post, displayed as four digits (e.g. ‘2016’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘07’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘07’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘08’)
• %minute% – The minute the post is published (e.g. ‘49’)
• %second% – The exact second your post is published (e.g. ‘11’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘4531’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted version of your post title. For example, if the post title is ”Ten Best Hotels In Cote D’Azur!”, the postname tag will convert this into “ten-best-hotels-in-cote-dazur” (all lower case characters and removed punctuation marks) in the URL. Tip: You can edit the wording 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 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 the ‘Custom Structure’ option.

Optional Permalink Settings

Here you can set custom structures for your tag and category pages.

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

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

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

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

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

To this …

If you leave the optional settings fields blank WordPress uses the defaults.

Remember to save any 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 – Tips

Categories

To get the most benefit from using Permalinks, remember 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 plugin developer Joost de Valk, here are a few things to consider if you are wondering whether or not to add categories to your permalink structure:

• If 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 copy and decrease the SEO benefit.
• 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 using category vs no category there really is no perfect 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 tutorials.

Create Timeless Posts

Another great tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your website provides news or time-specific information, or there is a special reason why you need to create dated web addresses, it’s best to avoid selecting date-based permalinks when setting up your site’s URLs.

(Avoid setting up URL structures that time-stamp your posts)

Although using URL structures that time-stamp your posts is better that using no permalinks at all from an SEO point-of-view, visitors are less likely to click on posts that are several years old, even if the content is relevant to what they are searching for.

What If My Blog Has Content?

Normally, your permalinks should be configured when you create a new WordPress site. This should be part of your website planning process.

If your website or blog 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 absolutely something that needs to be done, as changing permalinks after your site has already been up and running for a while can create issues and errors.

301 Redirects

As you’ve seen in the above screenshots of actual search results, many website owners (or their web developers) are completely unaware of the permalinks feature of WordPress.

Maybe when you started out, your site used the default WordPress URL structure 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 web address and now all of your posts are perceived as being out-of-date and you want to delete the date tags in your permalinks.

The best way to modify your URL structure without negatively impacting your site’s SEO or rankings is to add ‘301 redirects’ to reassign links that were set up using the previous URL structure to links that use the new permalink structure.

Search engines interpret a ’301′ code as a link that has permanently relocated to another address. 301 redirection is the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect visitors to new site destinations and avoid ‘404’ (Page not found) errors if clicking on 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 site or blog using WordPress redirection plugins 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 any problems and troubleshoot any errors.

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

Congratulations! Now you know about the built-in system WordPress uses to display SEO-friendly URLs for your posts and improve your search search rankings. To learn more about using Permalinks, see the official WordPress documentation here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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