Wouldn’t it be great if after adding content to your website or blog, the following could take place … all from your post address:

• Readers could gain an understanding of what your post was about,
• Search engines would be able to find your pages faster,
• Each post added to your site 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

What Is 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 others use to link to your articles or sections of your site or the links you send in emails pointing readers to your posts. Some people also call permalinks “pretty” URLs.

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

Why Use Permalinks?

Hopefully, you probably know by now that, WordPress is one of the best Content Management Systems you can use when it comes to publishing search engines optimized content.

WordPress is not only well optimized straight out of the box, but there are SEO plugins you can use that can help to finetune its SEO aspect.

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

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

Now … let’s review the reason why you may need to use permalinks in WordPress.

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

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

As the screenshot taken from Google search results below shows, many site owners haven’t configured their permalinks to publish search optimized content …

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

To get more SEO benefit from using and improve your site’s rankings, you will want to make sure to 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 easily go from something that is non-SEO friendly like this …

To something like this …

In this step-by-step tutorial, you will learn how to configure the Permalinks section of your WordPress site to display posts with search engine-friendly URLs instead of the out-of-the-box linking structure and help every new post you publish on your site or blog automatically get better indexing results in search engines.

Configuring WordPress Permalinks

From your WordPress main 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 one.

Permalinks > Common Settings

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

(Set up 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/5-best-european-river-cruises

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=9006

(Using permalinks helps readers and search engines understand what the content 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 your post is published, four digits (e.g. ‘2011’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘06’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘12’)
• %hour% – The hour your post is published (e.g. ‘08’)
• %minute% – The minute the post is published (e.g. ‘52’)
• %second% – The exact second your post gets published (e.g. ‘19’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘1735’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of the post title. For example, if the post title is ”Ten Signs That You’re About To Get Fired From Your Job!”, the postname tag will convert this into “ten-signs-that-youre-about-to-get-fired-from-your-job” (all lower case letters and exclamation symbols deleted) in the URL. Tip: You can edit this wording 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.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

In this section, you can set up custom structures for your category and tag page URLs.

You can change 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 “news” as your category base would display your category links as ‘http://domain.com/news/uncategorized/’.

So, if you enter the following in your permalinks Optional > Category base settings section …

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

To this …

If you leave the 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 – Additional Information

Categories

To get greater 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 Joost de Valk, here are a few points to consider if you are wondering whether you should add categories to your permalinks or not:

• If your domain is short and your category name 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 or share 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 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 category vs no category there really is no ”better” permalink structure to use. We recommend choosing the permalink structure you think will suit your needs best and that will make your site’s web addresses short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We provide more information about WordPress categories in other tutorials.

Avoid Using Permalinks That Date Your Content

Another useful tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your site is a news site or you have a special reason to create dated web addresses, avoid using date-based permalink options when configuring your URLs.

(Avoid using permalinks that date your posts)

People are less likely to click on posts that are a couple of years old, even if the content is relevant to the answers they are searching for.

What About Sites With Published Posts?

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 doing so could create issues and errors.

Add 301 Redirects

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

Maybe you started out using the default WordPress URL structure and now you want to optimize your site better for search engines. Perhaps your site was originally set up to display post dates in your web address and now all of your content is perceived as being outdated and you want to remove the date portion of the permalinks.

The best way to modify your permalinks without affecting your site’s SEO or existing rankings in a negative way is to use ‘301 redirections’ to point all links that use the previous URL syntax to links that use the new permalinks syntax.

A code ‘301’ is interpreted by search engines as a link that has permanently relocated. 301 redirection is the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect visitors to new web page destinations and avoid ”page not found” errors if following an old link.

To create an effective syntax change and avoid damaging your rankings, sending visitors to broken links, etc. you should set up your redirection system before changing the permalink structure of your site.

You can WP site using 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 URL redirections using plugins or use the services of a professional)

Congratulations! Now you know how to set up your site’s permalinks to display SEO-friendly URLs for your posts. To learn more about using Permalinks, see the WordPress codex here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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