Wouldn’t it be great if you could add a new post to your website or blog, and the following would then take place … just from your post URL:

• Potential site visitors could determine what your page is about,
• Search engines could easily find your page and correctly classify its content for better search results,
• Every content item you create on your website would have a unique ID, making things easier to manage.

Well, this is what permalinks let you do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

What Are Permalinks?

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 URL that others will use to link to your posts or sections of your site or the links you send in an email pointing readers to your posts. Permalinks are often called “pretty” URLs.

Permalinks make the URL pointing to each post on your site permanent, hence a permalink.

Why Do You Need To Use Permalinks?

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

WordPress is not only well optimized right out of the box, but there are SEO plugins you can use that will help to enhance its SEO aspect considerably.

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

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

Now … let’s review the reason why you may need to set up permalinks if publishing content in WordPress.

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

The above link structure is used by WordPress to find information within its database. It doesn’t really mean anything to search engines or visitors, and it doesn’t help your site with on-site search engine optimization.

As you can see from the image below, many WordPress site owners are still using out of the box settings when publishing content …

Although these sites are getting their content indexed on search engines, many site owners are missing out on additional SEO benefits.

To get the best possible SEO benefit out of using WordPress and improve your site’s rankings, you should configure your permalinks structure to make it more search engine-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 go from this …

To something like this …

In this tutorial, you will learn how to set up your WordPress permalinks to display your posts with SEO-friendly URLs instead of the out-of-the-box linking structure and help every new post you publish on your site or blog get better indexing in Google.

Changing WordPress Permalinks

Log into your WordPress admin section and select Settings > Permalinks …

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

Permalinks - Common Settings

In the Common Settings section, select Custom Structure, then add one or more ‘tags’ (see below) to create SEO-friendly URLs …

(Set up 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=199

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

Pretty Permalink Tags

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

• %year% – The year your post is published, four digits (e.g. ‘2010’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘09’)
• %day% – The day your post gets published (e.g. ‘21’)
• %hour% – The hour the post gets published (e.g. ‘14’)
• %minute% – The minute the post is published (e.g. ‘41’)
• %second% – The exact second the post is published (e.g. ‘25’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘3487’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of the 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 lower case characters and no exclamation marks) in the URL. Tip: You can 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 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 adding the /%postname%/ tag in the ‘Custom Structure’ option.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

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

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

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

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

So, if you add the following to your permalinks Optional > Category base settings field …

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 your 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 – Tips

Use Descriptive Categories

To get the maximum SEO benefit from 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 and author of the WordPress SEO plugin Joost de Valk, here are a few points 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 name is short and descriptive (e.g. uses a relevant keyword or keyword phrase), 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 reduce the SEO benefit.
• Do you plan to post content under only one category or multiple categories? If you plan 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 ”better” permalink structure to use. Use a permalink structure that you think will suit your needs best. Your post URLs should be short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We provide more information about WordPress categories in other articles.

Avoid Using URL Structures That Time-Stamp Your Content

Another tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your website provides news, 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 date 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 the answers they are searching for.

What About An Established Blog?

Normally, it’s best to configure your permalinks when you create a new WordPress site. This should be part of your site planning process.

If your website or blog is already established or your site already has a lot of content indexed in the search engines and you want to change the permalink structure, make sure that this is really necessary, as making changes to permalinks after your site has been going for a while can create SEO issues and errors.

301 Redirects

As you’ve seen in earlier screenshots, many WordPress users (or whoever set up their site) seem to be unaware of the permalinks feature of WordPress.

Maybe when you started out, your site used the default WordPress permalinks and now you want to improve your site’s SEO. Perhaps 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 old and you want to delete the date tags of your URLs.

To modify your permalink structure without negatively impacting your site’s SEO you should use ‘301 redirections’ to point all links using the previous permalinks syntax to destinations that use the new syntax.

Search engines interpret a code ‘301’ as a link that has permanently moved to another destination. 301 redirects are the most efficient and search engine friendly way to redirect visitors to new site destinations and avoid running into page errors when clicking on an old link.

To effectively change your syntax and avoid damaging your search rankings, sending visitors to error pages, etc. you should add a redirection system before changing the permalink structure of your site.

You can WordPress site 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 301 redirects using 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 and improve your search results. To learn more about using Permalinks, refer to the official WordPress documentation below:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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