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

• Users could quickly determine what your content is about,
• Google could easily discover your posts and correctly classify their content to improve your search results,
• Every single content item you create on your site would have its own unique identifier, making your content easier to manage.

Well, with WordPress permalinks this can easily be done!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – Definition

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 posts or sections of your site or the links you send in an email pointing to your posts. Permalinks are often called “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?

As you are probably aware, WordPress is one of the best CMS applications available when it comes to SEO.

WordPress is not only great for SEO out of the box, but the SEO aspect can be considerably finetuned with excellent SEO plugins.

If you are looking to optimize the SEO aspect of your website, then you cannot ignore the importance of its site’s URLs. Google places considerable weight on the structure of a site’s URLs when indexing site pages.

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

Now … let’s take a look at the reason why you should set up permalinks in WordPress.

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

WordPress uses the link structure with a string query shown above to locate information inside its database. It does not help your website with on-site SEO.

As the screenshot taken from Google search listings below shows, many WordPress site owners have not yet configured their permalinks to publish search optimized content …

Although these sites are getting their content indexed on search engines, they are potentially missing out on additional SEO benefits.

To get greater SEO benefit from using and improve your site’s rankings, you will want to make sure to configure your permalinks structure to make it more search engine-friendly by displaying relevant keywords in your URL, instead of meaningless characters.

WordPress allows you to create a custom URL structure for your published and archived posts, so your pages can go from this …

To something with an SEO-friendly URL like this …

In this tutorial, you will learn how to set up your WordPress permalinks to display posts with SEO-friendly URLs instead of the default linking structure and help every new post you add get better indexing in search engines like Google.

Configuring WordPress Permalinks

From your WordPress dashboard menu, select 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 search engine friendly URLs instead for our posts. To do this, we will need to specify a different Permalink structure than the one set by 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 …

(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/budget-cruises/top-seven-european-cruise-destinations

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=2717

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

WordPress Permalink 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% – The month the post is published (e.g. ‘08’)
• %day% – The day your post gets published (e.g. ‘31’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘04’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘20’)
• %second% – The exact second the post gets published (e.g. ‘04’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘172’)
• %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 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 selecting ‘Custom Structure’ and adding the /%postname%/ tag.

Optional Permalink Settings

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

You can change the ‘base’ category or tag for your 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 will make your category links display as ‘http://domain.com/recipes/uncategorized/’.

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

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

To something like this …

If you leave the fields blank the default settings will be used.

Remember to save your 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

Set Up Categories

To get the maximum benefit from using Permalinks, it’s important 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 a few things to consider 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. uses a relevant keyword or keyword phrase), you may want to add categories 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 or copy and reduce 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.

Despite being the subject of intense debate in WordPress SEO circles, when it comes to using category vs no category there is no perfect permalink structure to use. We recommend choosing the permalink structure you think will suit your site 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 another article.

Don’t Use Date Permalinks

Another tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your website provides news, or there is a special reason why you need to create dated web addresses, it’s best to avoid choosing date-based permalink options when setting up your URLs.

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

Although setting up 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 the answers they are searching for.

What About Blogs With Published Posts?

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

If your site has been running for a while or your site already has many posts indexed in the search engines and you want to change the permalink structure, make sure that this is really something that needs to be done, as changing permalinks after your site has been up and running for a while can create SEO issues and errors.

301 Redirects

As you’ve seen in the above screenshots of actual search results, some WordPress site owners (or their web developers) are completely unaware of the permalinks feature of WordPress.

Maybe you started out using the default WordPress URL structure and now you would like to improve your site’s SEO. Perhaps your site was configured to display post dates in your web address and now all of your posts are showing as being old and you want to remove the date portion of the permalinks.

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

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

To create an effective permalink structure change and avoid damaging your rankings, sending visitors to error pages, etc. you should install and set up your redirection system before messing with the permalink structure of your site.

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

(Set up a 301 redirection system using a WordPress redirection plugin or get professional assistance)

Congratulations! Now you know how to set up your WordPress site or blog’s permalinks to display search engine-friendly URLs for your posts. To learn more about using Permalinks, see the WordPress codex below:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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