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

• New visitors could gain an understanding of what your page was about,
• Google could find your posts faster,
• Every single content item added to your website or blog would have its own unique ID, making things easier to manage.

Well, with permalinks this can easily be done!

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 group things together) like archives.

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

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

Permalinks – Why Do I Need To Use Them?

Hopefully, you probably know 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 well optimized right out of the box, but its SEO aspect can be further finetuned using excellent SEO plugins.

If you are looking to optimize the SEO aspect of your website, then you should not ignore the importance of its URLs. Search engines like Google tend to pay special attention to the structure of your site’s URLs when indexing content.

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

Now … let’s take a look at the reason why you may need to set up permalinks if publishing content in WordPress.

Normally, a default WordPress installation uses a link-naming structure for your posts that isn’t very search engine friendly and looks like this …

The link structure shown above is used by WordPress to find information inside your database. It doesn’t really help your website with on-site search engine optimization.

As the screenshot image taken directly from Google search listings below shows, many WordPress users are still using out of the box permalink settings when publishing their content …

Although Google is clearly still indexing the above sites, many site owners are potentially missing out on extra SEO benefits.

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

WordPress offers the ability to create a custom URL structure for your published and archived posts, so your pages can easily go from this …

To this …

By default, WordPress post URLs are not very SEO-friendly. This tutorial explains how to configure the Permalinks section of your WordPress site to help your content rank better in search engines.

Setting Up Your WordPress Permalinks

From your WP admin menu, 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 need to specify a different Permalink structure than the default.

Common Settings – Permalinks

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

(Configure 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/budget-travel/how-to-save-money-on-cruise-travel

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=7243

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

Pretty 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, displayed as four digits (e.g. ‘2014’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘12’)
• %day% – The day the post is published (e.g. ‘03’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘18’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘07’)
• %second% – The exact second the post is published (e.g. ‘28’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘5125’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted version of the 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 exclamation symbols) in the URL. Tip: You can edit this 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 correctly formatted 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 selecting ‘Custom Structure’ and using the /%postname%/ tag.

Optional Permalink Settings

Here you can configure custom structures for your tag and category archive page URLs.

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

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

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

So, if you add the following to your permalinks Optional > Category base settings field …

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

To something like this …

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

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

Categories

To get maximum SEO benefit out of using Permalinks, remember 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 some things to keep in mind if you are wondering whether you should add categories to your permalinks or not:

• If your category slug is short and descriptive (e.g. uses a relevant keyword or keyword phrase), 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 share or copy and reduce the SEO benefit.
• Do you plan to post content under only one category or multiple categories? 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 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 post URLs short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We provide detailed information about WordPress categories in other articles.

Don’t Use Date Permalinks

Another great tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your site provides news, or you have any special reason to create dated website addresses, avoid choosing date-based permalink options when setting up your blog’s URLs.

(Avoid using URL structures that time-stamp your posts)

Although using URL structures that time-stamp your posts may be considered better that using no permalinks at all from an SEO aspect, visitors are less likely to click on a post that is several years old, even if the content is relevant to what they are searching for.

What If My Site Has Lots Of Content?

Normally, your site’s permalinks should be configured when you create a new WordPress site. This should be part of your website planning process.

If your site is already established or you have a lot of content already 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 loss of traffic.

Add 301 Redirection

As you’ve seen earlier, some WordPress users (or their web developers) seem to be completely unaware of the permalinks feature of WordPress.

Maybe when you started, your site used the default WordPress permalinks and now you want to improve your SEO. Maybe your website or blog was configured to display post dates in your URLs and now all of your posts are showing as being two or three years old and you want to remove the date tags in your URLs.

To modify your URL structure without negatively impacting your site’s SEO you should add ‘301 redirects’ to point links set up using the old permalinks structure to web URLs that use the new permalinks syntax.

A code ‘301’ is interpreted by search engines as a link that has permanently moved to another destination. 301 redirects are the most efficient and search engine friendly way to redirect users to new web page destinations and avoid page errors when following an old link.

To effectively change your permalink structure and avoid SEO problems, sending visitors to error pages, etc. you will need to install and set up a redirection system before changing the permalink structure of your site.

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

(Set up 301 redirects using plugins or use the services of a professional)

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

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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