Wouldn’t it be great if after publishing a new page on your website, the following happened … just from your post URL:

• Potential visitors could quickly assess what the page was about,
• Google would be able to find your posts faster,
• Each item of content added to your site 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

Permalinks – Definition

A permalink is the permanent URL to an individual post, category, or other taxonomy (a way to group things together) like archives.

A permalink is the web address that other people use to link to posts or sections of your site or the links you send in emails pointing readers to articles 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 Use Them?

Hopefully, you are probably aware that, WordPress is one of the best CMS applications you can use when it comes to SEO.

WordPress is not only great for SEO out of the box, but there are SEO plugins you can use that will help to enhance its SEO aspect further.

If you are looking to optimize the SEO aspect of your website, then you cannot ignore the importance of your URLs. Search engines like Google tend to give special consideration to the structure of URLs when indexing its content.

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 review why it’s best to use permalinks in WordPress.

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

WordPress uses the link structure with a string query shown above to find information inside its database. It does not mean anything to visitors or search engines, and it doesn’t help your website with on-site search engine optimization.

As you can see from the screenshot image below taken directly from Google search results, many WordPress users haven’t yet configured their sites to use WordPress permalinks …

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

To get the most SEO benefit from using WordPress and improve your site’s rankings, you should configure your permalinks structure to make it more SEO-friendly by displaying relevant keywords in your URL, instead of meaningless numbers and symbols.

WordPress allows you to 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 something with an SEO-friendly URL like this …

Out of the box, WordPress post URLs are not very search engine-friendly. This tutorial shows you how to configure your permalinks in WordPress to display your posts using search engine-friendly URLs.

Configuring Your WordPress Permalinks

Log into your WordPress admin and select Settings > Permalinks …

This will bring 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 “pretty” permalink instead for our posts. To do this, we will need to specify a different Permalink structure than the one set by default.

Common 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 SEO-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/europe-cruises/how-to-save-money-on-cruise-travel

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=3782

(Using permalinks helps search engines and visitors understand what your page is about)

How To Use Permalink Tags In WordPress

“Pretty” URLs, or search engine-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. ‘2014’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘11’)
• %day% – The day your post is published (e.g. ‘17’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘07’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘20’)
• %second% – The exact second the post gets published (e.g. ‘49’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘9449’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted version of the post title. For example, if your 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 removed punctuation marks) in the URL. Tip: You can always edit the words in your post titles 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 adding the /%postname%/ tag in the ‘Custom Structure’ setting.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

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

You can change the ‘base’ category or tag URLs using the following structure:

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

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

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

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

To something like this …

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

Remember to save your changes when 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

Use Descriptive Categories

To get the best possible benefit out of using Permalinks, you will need 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 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 domain is short and your category 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 plan to post content under multiple categories, then we recommend not using 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 ideal permalink structure to use. Use a permalink structure you think will suit your needs best. Many SEO experts and webmasters recommend making your web address short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We provide detailed information about WordPress categories in other tutorials.

Create Timeless Posts

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

(Avoid using permalinks that date your content)

Although using permalinks that time-stamp your posts is better that using no permalinks at all from an SEO point-of-view, 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 If My Site Has Content?

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

If your website is already established 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 something that needs to be done, as doing so could 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) seem to be completely 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. Perhaps your site was configured to display post dates in your URLs and now all of your content is showing as being two or three years old and you want to delete the date tags in the URLs.

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

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

To create an effective permalink syntax change and avoid damaging your rankings, sending visitors to broken links, etc. you will need to add your redirection system before messing with the permalink structure of your site.

You can add a link redirection system to your do this using a redirection 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 URL redirections using redirection plugins or get professional assistance)

Congratulations! Now you know how to set up your WordPress 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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