Wouldn’t it be great if after publishing a new post on your WordPress website or blog, the following happened … just from your page address:

• Users could understand what your content is about,
• Google would discover your pages faster,
• Every content item on your website would have a unique identifier, making your content easier to manage.

Well, this is what permalinks let you do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

What’s A Permalink?

A permalink is the permanent URL to an individual post, category, or other taxonomy (a way to group 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 readers to content items on your blog. Permalinks are often called “pretty” URLs.

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

Why Use Permalinks?

Hopefully, you probably know that, WordPress is one of the best CMS tools available when it comes to publishing search engines optimized content.

WordPress is not only well optimized right out of the box, but there are excellent SEO plugins you can use that will help to improve its SEO aspect further.

If you focus on the SEO aspect of your site or blog, then you should not ignore the importance of its URLs. Search engines like Google tend to give special consideration to the structure of URLs when indexing its content.

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

Now … let’s take a look at the reason why you should set up permalinks in WordPress.

Normally, a default WordPress installation uses a URL-naming 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 its database. It does not help your site with on-site search engine optimization.

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

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

To get the maximum SEO benefit out of using and improve your site’s traffic results, 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 easily go from this …

To this …

In this step-by-step tutorial, you will learn how to configure your WordPress permalinks to display posts with search engine-friendly URLs instead of the out-of-the-box URL structure and help every new post you publish automatically get better indexing in Google.

Setting Up WordPress Permalinks

In your WP administration menu, select Settings > Permalinks …

This brings 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 SEO-friendly URLs …

(Change 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-cruises/cruise-holiday-bargains

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=6022

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

Using Permalink 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. ‘04’)
• %day% – The day the post is published (e.g. ‘29’)
• %hour% – The hour your post is published (e.g. ‘02’)
• %minute% – The minute the post gets published (e.g. ‘47’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘15’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘8958’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted version of the post title. For example, if your post title is “Top Five Budget Travel Tips!”, the postname tag will convert this into “top-five-budget-travel-tips” (all characters converted to lower case and no exclamation marks) in the URL. Tip: You can always edit this 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’.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

If you need to set up custom structures for your category and tag pages here is where you would do this.

You can change the ‘base’ category or tag of your URLs using the following structure:

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

For example, changing your category base to “news” would display your category links as ‘http://domain.com/news/category_name/’.

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 this …

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

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 Descriptive Categories

To get the best SEO benefit out of using Permalinks, it’s important 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 some 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 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 site best and that will make your web address 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 site or there is a special reason why you need to date your site’s content, avoid using date-based permalink options when setting up your URLs.

(Avoid using URL structures that date your content)

Although using URL structures that time-stamp your content may be considered better that using no permalinks at all from an SEO perspective, visitors 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.

Changing Permalinks In Blog With Many Published Posts

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

If your website is already established or you have a lot of content already indexed in the search engines and you want to change the permalink structure, make sure that this is really necessary, as doing so can create SEO issues and errors.

Use 301 Redirection

As you’ve seen in earlier screenshots, many WordPress users (or whoever set up their site) seem to be completely unaware of the search-friendly URLs feature of WordPress.

Maybe you started out using the default WordPress permalinks and now you would like 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 showing as being two or three years old and you want to delete the date portion of the URLs.

To edit your URL structure without impacting your site’s SEO in a negative way you will need to add ‘301 redirects’ to point all links that use the previous permalink structure to destinations using the new permalinks structure.

A ’301′ code is interpreted by search engines as a link that has permanently been moved. 301 redirection is the most efficient and search engine friendly way to redirect visitors to new website destinations and avoid running into ‘404’ (Page not found) errors if following an old link.

To effectively change your permalink structure and avoid damaging your search rankings, sending visitors to error pages, etc. you will need to add 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 plugins like Simple 301 Redirects, or Redirection, or get a professional to help you set up and redirect your permalinks correctly to avoid issues and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up URL 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. For additional information on using Permalinks, refer to the official WordPress documentation here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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