Wouldn’t it be great if you could publish content on your site, and the following would then take place … just from your post URL:

• Visitors could glean what your post was about,
• Search engines would be able to find your pages faster,
• Each post you create on your website or blog would have a unique identifier, making your site easier to manage.

Well, this is what permalinks let you do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – Definition

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 URL that other people use to link to your articles or sections of your site or the links you send in emails pointing readers to content items on your blog. Permalinks are often called “pretty” URLs.

Permalinks make the URLs to each post on your blog permanent, hence a permalink.

Why Use Permalinks?

As you have probably heard by now, WordPress is one of the best Content Management Systems available when it comes to SEO.

WordPress is not only great for SEO out of the box, but its SEO aspect can be considerably improved using SEO plugins.

If you focus on the SEO aspect of your site, then you cannot ignore the importance of your site’s URLs. Google tends to give special significance to the URL structure of a site.

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

Now … let’s take a look at the reason why you may need to configure your permalinks when publishing content in WordPress.

Typically, a default WordPress installation uses a non-search engine friendly URL structure for your posts that looks like this …

WordPress uses the link with a string query shown above to locate data inside your database. It does not mean much to anyone, and it doesn’t help your website with on-site search engine optimization.

As you can see from the screenshot below, many WordPress site owners haven’t configured their sites to use WordPress permalinks …

Although Google is still indexing the above sites, they are potentially missing out on extra SEO benefits.

To get optimal SEO benefit from using and improve your site’s traffic results, you should set up your permalinks structure to make it more SEO-friendly by displaying relevant keywords in your URL, instead of meaningless characters.

WordPress offers the ability to create a custom URL structure for your published and archived posts, so your content can go from something that is non-SEO friendly like this …

To this …

By default, WordPress URLs are not very SEO-friendly. In this tutorial, you will learn how to configure your permalinks in WordPress to help your content get better indexing in search engines.

Configuring Your WordPress Permalinks

From your WordPress main 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 search engine friendly URL instead for our posts. To do this, we 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 …

(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-cruises/5-favourite-european-river-cruise-destinations

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=4741

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

Search Engine-Friendly Tags

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

• %year% – The year the post is published, displayed as four digits (e.g. ‘2016’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘07’)
• %day% – The day your post is published (e.g. ‘17’)
• %hour% – The hour your post is published (e.g. ‘08’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘36’)
• %second% – The exact second the post is published (e.g. ‘24’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘3700’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted 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 characters converted to lower case and punctuation marks deleted) 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 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 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 adding the /%postname%/ tag in ‘Custom Structure’.

Optional Permalink Settings

In this section, you can set up custom structures for your tag and category pages.

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

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

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

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

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

To this …

If you leave these fields blank WordPress uses the defaults.

Remember to save your changes after 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 – Additional Notes

Use Descriptive Categories

To get maximum benefit out of using Permalinks, you will need 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 plugin developer Joost de Valk, here are some points to keep in mind if you are wondering whether you should add categories to your permalink structure or not:

• If your category slug 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 share or copy and decrease 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 using category vs no category there is no ideal permalink structure to use. Use the permalink structure that you think will suit your site best. Your web address should be short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We provide detailed 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 add dates to your post URLs, it’s best to avoid choosing date-based permalink settings when configuring your site’s URLs.

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

Visitors are less likely to click on a post that is a couple of years old, even if the content is relevant to what they are searching for.

What If My Blog Already Has Lots Of Content?

Normally, it’s best to set up your permalinks when you first install WordPress. This should be part of your site planning process.

If your website or blog is already established or your site already has many posts indexed in the search engines and you would like to change the permalink structure, make sure that this is something that absolutely needs doing, as doing so can create SEO issues and errors.

Use 301 Redirects

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

Maybe you started out using the default WordPress URL structure and now you would like to improve your site’s SEO. Maybe your website or blog was originally set up to display post dates in your URLs and now all of your content is showing as being 2-3 years old and you want to delete the date tags of the permalinks.

To edit your permalink structure without negatively impacting your site’s SEO you should use ‘301 redirects’ to point links set up using the old URL structure to page URLs using the new structure.

A ’301′ code is interpreted by search engines as a link that has been permanently moved elsewhere. 301 redirects are the most efficient and search engine friendly way to redirect visitors to new site destinations and avoid running into ”page not found” errors when clicking on an old link.

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

You can add a link redirection system to your site using redirection plugins like Simple 301 Redirects, or Redirection, or use the services of a professional to help you set up and redirect your permalinks correctly to avoid any problems and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up a link redirection system using a WordPress redirection plugin or get professional assistance)

Congratulations! Now you know how to configure your blog to display SEO-friendly URLs for your posts. For additional information on using Permalinks, refer to the WordPress codex below:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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