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

• Users could assess what the page is about,
• Search engines could discover your pages faster,
• Every single item of content added to your website or blog would have a unique ID, making your content easier to manage.

Well, with WordPress permalinks you can!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalink – What Is It?

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

A permalink is the web address that people and search engines use to link to your posts or sections of your site or the links you send in an email pointing to a specific item of content on your site. Some people also call permalinks “pretty” URLs.

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

Permalinks – Why Do I Need To Use Them?

Hopefully, you probably know that, WordPress is one of the best CMS applications you can use 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 fine tuned its SEO aspect considerably.

If you are looking to optimize the SEO aspect of your website, then you cannot ignore the importance of its site’s URLs. Search engines like Google tend to give special significance to the URL structure of your site.

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

Now … let’s see why you may need to set up permalinks when publishing content in WordPress.

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

WordPress uses the link with a string query shown above to locate information within your database. It doesn’t really help your website with on-site search engine optimization.

As you can see from the screenshot below taken directly from Google search listings, many site owners haven’t configured their permalinks …

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

To get optimal SEO benefit out of using WordPress and improve your site’s traffic results, you should 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 gives you the ability to create a custom URL structure for your published posts, so your content can easily go from this …

To something with an SEO-friendly URL like this …

Out of the box, WordPress post URLs are not very search engine-friendly. In this step-by-step tutorial, you will learn how to configure the Permalinks section of your WordPress site to get better indexing in search engines like Google.

Configuring Your WordPress Permalinks

Log into your WordPress admin 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 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/cruise-deals/river-cruise-holiday-deals

Instead of this …

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

(Using permalinks helps readers understand what the page is about)

Using Permalink Tags

“Pretty” permalinks, 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. ‘11’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘10’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘03’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘13’)
• %second% – The exact second the post is published (e.g. ‘01’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘2318’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of your post title. For example, if your post title is ”Ten Best Hotels In Cote D’Azur!”, the postname tag will convert this into “ten-best-hotels-in-cote-dazur” (all characters converted to lower case and punctuation symbols removed) in the URL. Tip: You can always edit the wording in your post title 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 the ‘Custom Structure’ setting and adding the /%postname%/ tag.

Optional Permalink Settings

Here you can set custom structures for your category and tag pages.

This changes the ‘base’ category or tag 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 would display your category links as ‘http://domain.com/recipes/category_name/’.

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

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

To something like this …

If you leave the fields blank WordPress uses the defaults.

Remember to save any changes when you are done …

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 the greatest benefit from using Permalinks, remember 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 and author of the WordPress SEO plugin Joost de Valk, here are some things to consider if you are wondering whether you should add categories to your permalink structure or not:

• If your category name 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 share and decrease the SEO benefit.
• 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 really is no perfect permalink structure to use. Use a permalink structure you think will suit your site best. SEO experts recommend making your post URLs short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We cover WordPress categories in other articles.

Don’t Use Date Permalinks

Another tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your goal is to run a news blog or you have a special reason to add dates to your post URLs, avoid using date-based permalink settings for your blog’s URLs.

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

Although setting up URL structures that date your content is better that using no permalinks at all from an SEO aspect, visitors are less likely to click on a post if it is several years old, even if the content is relevant to what they are searching for.

What About Sites With Indexed Content?

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

If your website has been running for a while 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 could create issues and loss of traffic.

301 Redirection

As you’ve seen in the above screenshots of actual search results, some WordPress site owners (or their web developers) seem to be completely unaware of the search-friendly URLs feature of WordPress.

Maybe when you started out, your site used the default WordPress permalinks and now you would like to improve your site’s SEO. Maybe your website was originally set up to display post dates in your URLs and now all of your posts are showing as being 2-3 years old and you want to delete the date tags of your permalinks.

The best way to edit your permalink structure without affecting your site’s SEO in a negative way is to add ‘301 redirects’ to reassign links that were set up using the old permalinks syntax to page URLs that use the new permalink syntax.

Search engines interpret a code ‘301’ as a link that has permanently relocated. 301 redirects are the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect users to new website destinations and avoid page errors when clicking on an old link.

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

You can add a link redirection system to your site or blog using WP 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 301 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, refer to the WordPress codex here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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