Wouldn’t it be great if you could simply add a new page to your website, and the following took place … just from your page address:

• Readers could understand what the page is about,
• Google would find your pages faster,
• Each item of content published on your site would have its own unique ID, making things easier to manage.

Well, with permalinks this is very easy to do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

What Are Permalinks?

Permalinks are the permanent URLs to your individual WordPress posts, categories and other taxonomies (a way to organize things together) like archives.

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

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

Permalinks – Why Do You Need To Use Them?

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

WordPress is not only great for SEO out of the box, but the SEO aspect can be further fine tuned with SEO plugins.

If you are looking to optimize the SEO aspect of your website, then you should not ignore the importance of your site’s URLs. Google tends to give special significance to the URL structure of your site.

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

Now … let’s see why you should use permalinks when 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 within its database. It does not mean anything to either visitors or search engines, and it doesn’t help your site with on-site search engine optimization.

As the screenshot image below shows, many WordPress users are still using default permalink settings when publishing their content online …

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

To get greater SEO benefit from using and improve your site’s traffic results, 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 characters.

WordPress lets you create a custom URL structure for your published posts, so your pages can easily go from something that is non-SEO friendly like this …

To this …

Out of the box, WordPress 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 help your content rank better in Google.

Changing WordPress Permalinks

Log into your WordPress admin and 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 search engine-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/best-value-european-river-cruises

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=4082

(Using post name permalinks helps visitors understand what your post is about)

Permalink 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, displayed as four digits (e.g. ‘2015’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘06’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘05’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘12’)
• %minute% – The minute your post gets published (e.g. ‘37’)
• %second% – The exact second the post gets published (e.g. ‘01’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘9101’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted version of your post title. For example, if the 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 exclamation marks removed) in the URL. Tip: You can always 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 selecting ‘Custom Structure’ and using the /%postname%/ tag.

Optional Permalink Settings

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

This changes the ‘base’ tag or category URLs using the following structure:

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

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

So, if you enter the following in 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 these fields blank the defaults will be used.

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 – Additional Notes

Set Up Your 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, 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 some things to keep in mind if you are wondering whether or not to add categories to your permalink structure:

• 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 plan to post content under multiple categories, then we recommend not using the category tag in your permalink structure.

Ultimately, when it comes to category vs no category there is no ”better” permalink structure to use. We recommend choosing the permalink structure you think will suit your needs best and that will make your web address short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We provide detailed information about WordPress categories in another article.

Don’t Use Date Permalinks

Another useful tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your goal is to run a news website or there is a special reason why you need to add dates to your URLs, avoid choosing date-based permalink syntax when configuring your blog’s URLs.

(Avoid setting up permalinks that time-stamp your posts)

People are less likely to click on posts that are several years old, even if the content is relevant to the answers they are searching for.

Changing The Permalink Structure In Site With Many Published Posts

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 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 absolutely necessary, as making changes to permalinks after your site has already been going for a while can create SEO issues and loss of traffic.

301 Redirects

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

Maybe when you started, your site used the default WordPress URL structure and now you would like to improve your SEO. Maybe your website or blog was originally set up to display post dates in your web address and now all of your content is showing as being 2-3 years old and you want to remove the date portion of your URLs.

To change your permalink structure without negatively affecting your site’s SEO you will need to use ‘301 redirections’ to reassign all links set up using the previous URL structure to web addresses that use the new permalinks syntax.

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

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

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

(Set up link redirections using redirection plugins or use the services of a professional)

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

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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