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

• Readers could quickly gain an understanding of what the post was about,
• Search engines would be able to find your pages faster,
• Every single piece of content on your site would have a unique identifier, making things easier to manage.

Well, this is what a permalink lets you do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – Definition

Permalinks are the permanent URLs to an individual WordPress post, category, or other taxonomy (a way to group things together) like archives.

A permalink is the web address that other people will use to link to 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 refer to permalinks as “pretty” URLs.

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

Permalinks – Why Do I Need To Use Them?

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

WordPress is not only great for SEO out of the box, but there are SEO plugins you can install that will help to finetune its SEO aspect further.

If you focus on the SEO aspect of your site, then you cannot ignore the importance of its URLs. Search engines like Google place 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 set up permalinks in WordPress.

By default, a 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 information inside your database. It does not mean anything to visitors or search engines, and it doesn’t help your site with on-site search engine optimization.

As you can see from the screenshot below taken directly from Google search listings, many WordPress site owners are still using out-of-the-box permalink settings when publishing content online …

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

To get the maximum SEO benefit out of using WordPress and improve your site’s rankings, you will want to make sure to 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 lets you create a custom URL structure for your published and archived posts, so your content can easily go from this …

To this …

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

How To Change Your WordPress Permalinks

From your WordPress administration menu, select Settings > Permalinks …

This will bring 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 need to specify a different Permalink structure than the default.

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 …

(Set up 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/europe-cruises/7-best-european-river-cruise-destinations

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=8491

(Using permalinks helps visitors understand what the post is about)

WordPress Permalink Tags

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

• %year% – The year the post gets published, displayed as four digits (e.g. ‘2011’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘03’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘02’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘20’)
• %minute% – The minute your post gets published (e.g. ‘20’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘17’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘604’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of your post title. For example, if the post title is ”The Five Don’ts Of DIY Home Repair!”, the postname tag will convert this into “the-five-donts-of-diy-home-repair” (all lower case letters and removed punctuation marks) in the URL. Tip: You can always edit the URL text 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’ setting.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

If you need to set up custom permalinks for your category and tag archive page URLs you can do this in this section.

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 “travel” as your category base would make your category links display as ‘http://domain.com/travel/uncategorized/’.

So, if you make the following change in your permalinks Optional > Category base settings field …

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

To this …

If you leave these fields blank the default settings 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 – Tips

Use Short, Descriptive Categories

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

• 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 the category tag 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 share and reduce the SEO benefit.
• 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 ideal permalink structure to use. Choose a permalink structure you think will suit your needs best. Your post URLs should be short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We cover WordPress categories in other tutorials.

Create Timeless Posts

Another useful tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your goal is to run a news website or you have a special reason to create dated website URLs, avoid selecting date-based permalink options when configuring your site’s URLs.

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

Although setting up URL structures that date your posts is better that using no permalinks at all from an SEO point-of-view, 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 If My Blog Has Lots Of Content?

Normally, it’s best to configure your permalinks when you install 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 a lot of content indexed in the search engines and you want to change the permalink structure, make sure that this is absolutely necessary, as doing so could create SEO issues and loss of traffic.

Use 301 Redirection

As you’ve seen in earlier screenshots, some WordPress site owners (or their web developers) seem to be completely unaware of the SEO-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. Maybe your website or blog was originally set up to display post dates in your web address and now all of your content is perceived as being out-of-date and you want to delete the date portion of your permalinks.

To modify your permalinks without negatively affecting your site’s SEO or existing rankings you will need to use ‘301 redirections’ to point all links using the previous permalink structure to web URLs that use the new syntax.

A ’301′ code is interpreted by search engines as a link that has permanently relocated to another destination. 301 redirection is the most efficient and search engine friendly way to redirect visitors to new web page destinations and avoid running into page errors when following an old link.

To effectively change your syntax and avoid SEO problems, sending visitors to error pages, etc. you should add your redirection system before changing the permalink structure of your site.

You can WordPress site or blog 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 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 and improve your search search rankings. To learn more about using Permalinks, see the official WordPress documentation here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

***