Wouldn’t it be great if after publishing content on your website, the following happened … all from your page address:

• Potential site visitors could quickly tell what your post was about,
• Search engines could discover your posts faster,
• Every item of content created on your website would have a unique ID, making things easier to manage.

Well, with WordPress permalinks this is really easy to do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – Definition

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 URL that other people use to link to your posts or sections of your site or the links you send in emails pointing to a specific item of content on your blog. Some people also call permalinks “pretty” URLs.

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

Why Do You Need To Use Permalinks?

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

WordPress is not only well optimized right out of the box, but its SEO aspect can be easily enhanced using SEO plugins.

If you are looking to optimize the SEO aspect of your site, then you should not ignore the importance of your site’s URLs. Google places 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 turn our attention to the reason why it’s best to configure your permalinks in WordPress.

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

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

As you can see from the image below taken from Google search results, many site owners haven’t yet set up their sites to use WordPress permalinks …

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

To get maximum SEO benefit from using WordPress and improve your site’s rankings, 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 numbers and symbols.

WordPress allows you to create a custom URL structure for your published posts, so your pages can go from something that is non-SEO friendly like this …

To something like this …

Out of the box, WordPress URLs are not very search engine-friendly. In this tutorial, you will learn how to set up the Permalinks section of your WordPress site to get better indexing results in Google.

Setting Up WordPress Permalinks

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

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 …

(Configure 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/travel-tips/5-top-european-cruise-destinations

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=5535

(Using permalinks helps readers understand what your post is about)

Adding SEO-Friendly Tags In Custom Structure

“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. ‘2010’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘11’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘14’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘20’)
• %minute% – The minute your post gets published (e.g. ‘14’)
• %second% – The exact second the post is published (e.g. ‘12’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘4693’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted version of the post title. For example, if your post title is ”Ten Best Hotels In Cote D’Azur!”, the postname tag will convert this into “ten-best-hotels-in-cote-dazur” (all characters converted to lower case and exclamation symbols removed) 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 adding the /%postname%/ tag in ‘Custom Structure’.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

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

You can change the ‘base’ tag or category of your 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 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 something like this …

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

Remember to save any changes after 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

Use Descriptive Categories

To get the best benefit out of using Permalinks, it’s important 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 expert and author of the WordPress SEO plugin Joost de Valk, here are a few 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 is short and descriptive (e.g. adds a relevant keyword or keyword phrase to your URL), 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 and reduce the SEO benefit.
• Do you plan to post content under only one category or multiple categories? 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 category vs no category there 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 web address short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We cover WordPress categories in other articles.

Avoid Setting Up URL Structures That Time-Stamp Your Posts

Another useful tip from Joost de Valk is that unless you run a news website or you have a special reason to add dates to your URLs, it’s best to avoid selecting date-based permalink settings when configuring your site’s URLs.

(Avoid using permalinks that date your posts)

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

Changing The Permalink Structure In Site With Indexed Content

Normally, your permalinks should be configured when you perform a new WordPress installation. 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 necessary, as doing so could create SEO issues and errors.

Use 301 Redirects

As you’ve seen in earlier screenshots, some site owners (or their web developers) seem to be completely unaware of the search-friendly URLs feature of WordPress.

Maybe you started out using the default WordPress URL structure and now you would like to improve your SEO. Maybe your website or blog was originally set up to display post dates in your web address and now all of your posts are showing as being 2-3 years old and you want to delete the date tags in the permalinks.

To change your permalinks without negatively impacting your site’s SEO you will need to add ‘301 redirects’ to point links that use the previous permalink syntax to destinations that use the new structure.

Search engines interpret a ’301′ code as a link that has permanently been relocated to another destination. 301 redirects are the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect visitors to new website destinations and avoid page errors if they click on an old link.

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

You can add a link redirection system to your do this using redirection plugins like Simple 301 Redirects, or Redirection, or get 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 plugins or get professional assistance)

Congratulations! Now you know how to configure your permalinks to display search engine-friendly URLs for your posts and improve your search results. To learn more about using Permalinks, see the WordPress codex below:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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