Wouldn’t it be great if after adding a new post to your WordPress website, the following could take place … all from your URL:

• Readers could easily gain an understanding of what your page is about,
• Search engines would be able to easily discover your post and correctly classify its content to improve your search rankings,
• Every post created on your website would have its own unique ID, making your site easier to manage.

Well, this is what permalinks let you do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – Definition

A permalink is the permanent URL to your individual WordPress posts, categories and other taxonomies (a way to group things together) like archives.

A permalink is the web address that others will use to link to articles or sections of your site or the links you send in emails pointing to your posts. Some people also call permalinks “pretty” URLs.

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

Permalinks – Why Use Them?

As you have probably heard by now, WordPress is one of the best CMS tools available when it comes to SEO.

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

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

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

Now … let’s see why it’s best to configure your permalinks when publishing content in WordPress.

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

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

As you can see from the image below taken directly from Google search listings, many WordPress site owners have not set up their sites to use WordPress permalinks …

Although these sites are getting their content indexed on search engines, the owners of these sites are missing out on extra SEO benefits.

To get optimal SEO benefit from using WordPress 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 characters.

WordPress lets you create a custom URL structure for your published and archived posts, so your pages can go from this …

To this …

Out of the box, WordPress URLs are not very SEO-friendly. This tutorial explains how to configure the Permalinks section of your WordPress site to display posts with SEO-friendly URLs.

How To Configure Your WordPress Permalinks

Log into your WordPress dashboard and click on 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 will need to specify a different Permalink structure than the one set by default.

Common Settings – Permalinks

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-europe/seven-best-european-river-cruise-destinations

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=5783

(Using post name permalinks helps readers and search engines understand what the content is about)

Search Engine-Friendly Tags

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

• %year% – The year of the post, four digits (e.g. ‘2016’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘12’)
• %day% – The day the post is published (e.g. ‘28’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘07’)
• %minute% – The minute the post is published (e.g. ‘41’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘09’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘3845’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted 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 punctuation symbols removed) in the URL. Tip: You can edit the URL wording 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’.

Optional Permalink Settings

If you need to configure custom structures for your tag and category page URLs you can do this in this section.

You can change the ‘base’ category or tag for your URLs using the following syntax:

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

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

So, if you add the following to 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 fields blank the defaults will be used.

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 – Additional Information

Use Short, Descriptive Categories

To get the greatest SEO benefit from 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 Joost de Valk, here are a few things to keep in mind if you are wondering whether or not to add categories to your permalinks:

• If your category is short and descriptive (e.g. adds a relevant keyword or keyword phrase to your URL), you may want to add the category tag 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 decrease the SEO benefit.
• If you plan to post content under multiple categories, then it’s recommended that you do not use 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 is no ”better” permalink structure to use. Choose the permalink structure that you think will suit your site best. Your post URLs should be short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We cover WordPress categories in other tutorials.

Avoid Time-Specific Permalink Syntax

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

(Avoid using permalinks that time-stamp your content)

People 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.

Changing The Permalink Structure In An Established Site

Normally, it’s best to set up your permalinks when you perform a new WordPress installation. This should be part of your website planning process.

If your website has been running for a while 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 something that absolutely needs doing, as changing permalinks after your site has been up and running for a while could create issues and errors.

301 Redirects

As you’ve seen earlier, some WordPress site owners (or their web developers) 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. Maybe your website was originally set up to display post dates in your web address and now all of your posts are showing as being two or three years old and you want to delete the date portion of the permalinks.

The best way to modify your permalink structure without negatively affecting your site’s SEO or existing rankings is to add ‘301 redirects’ to reassign links set up using the old permalinks syntax to post URLs that use the new syntax.

A code ‘301’ is interpreted by search engines as a link that has been permanently relocated. 301 redirection is the most efficient and search engine friendly way to redirect users to new website destinations and avoid running into 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 will need to add a redirection system before changing the permalink structure of your site.

You can WP site or blog using a redirection plugin like Simple 301 Redirects, or Redirection, or get a professional to help you set up and redirect your permalinks correctly to avoid any problems and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up link redirections using redirection plugins or get professional help)

Congratulations! Now you know about the built-in system WordPress uses to display search engine-friendly URLs for your posts and improve your search search rankings. For additional information on using Permalinks, see the official WordPress documentation below:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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