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

• Visitors could easily glean what your post was about,
• Google could find your pages faster,
• Every post you create on your website or blog would have its own unique identifier, making things easier to manage.

Well, this is what permalinks let you do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

What’s A Permalink?

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 others use to link to posts or sections of your site or the links you send in an email pointing readers to articles on your site. Some people also call permalinks “pretty” URLs.

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

Permalinks – Why Use Them?

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

WordPress is not only well optimized straight out of the box, but there are SEO plugins you can use that can further help to fine tuned its SEO aspect.

If you are looking to optimize the SEO aspect of your site, then you should not ignore the importance of your URLs. Google tends to pay special attention to the structure of URLs when indexing its content.

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

Now … let’s review the reason why it’s best to configure your permalinks when publishing content in WordPress.

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

WordPress uses the link with a string query shown above to locate information within your database. It does not help your website with on-site search engine optimization.

As the screenshot image below shows, many WordPress site owners have not yet configured their permalinks to publish search optimized content online …

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

To get maximum SEO benefit out of using WordPress and improve your site’s traffic results, you should 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 go from something that is non-SEO friendly like this …

To this …

Out of the box, WordPress post URLs are not very search engine-friendly. This tutorial shows you how to configure your WP permalinks to automatically get better indexing results in Google.

Setting Up WordPress Permalinks

Log into your WP dashboard and 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 need to specify a different Permalink structure than the default one.

Common Settings – Permalinks

In the Common Settings section, select Custom Structure, then add one or more ‘tags’ (see below) to create SEO-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/europe-cruises/how-to-save-money-on-cruise-travel

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=8475

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

How To Create Search Engine-Friendly Tags In WordPress

“Pretty” permalinks, 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. ‘2016’)
• %monthnum% – The month the post gets published (e.g. ‘02’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘05’)
• %hour% – The hour your post is published (e.g. ‘05’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘22’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘37’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘8475’)
• %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 lower case characters and no exclamation 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 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 choosing the ‘Custom Structure’ setting and using the /%postname%/ tag.

Optional Permalink Settings

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

This changes the ‘base’ tag or category 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 enter the following 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 defaults will be used.

Remember to save any changes when 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

Use Short, Descriptive Categories

To get the optimal benefit from using Permalinks, it’s important 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 some points to keep in mind if you are wondering whether you should add categories to your permalinks or not:

• If your domain is short and your category slug 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 decrease the SEO benefit.
• 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.

Despite being the subject of intense debate in WordPress SEO circles, when it comes to category vs no category there really 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 post URLs short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We provide more information about WordPress categories in other articles.

Don’t Use Date Permalinks

Another useful tip from Joost de Valk is that unless you plan to run a news blog or you have any special reason to create dated web addresses, it’s best to avoid using date-based permalink syntax when setting up your URLs.

(Avoid using URL structures that date your content)

Although using URL structures that time-stamp your posts is 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 Changing Permalinks In Blogs With Published Content?

Normally, your permalinks should be set up when you perform a new WordPress installation. This should be part of your website planning process.

If your website or blog is already established or you have a lot of content already 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 making changes to permalinks after your site has been running for a while can create SEO issues and errors.

Use 301 Redirects

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

Maybe you started out using the default WordPress permalinks and now you want to improve your SEO. Maybe your website or blog was configured to display post dates in your web address and now all of your content is perceived as being out-of-date and you want to delete the date tags of your permalinks.

To edit your permalinks without impacting your site’s SEO or existing rankings in a negative way you will need to use ‘301 redirections’ to reassign links set up using the previous permalink syntax to URLs that use the new permalink syntax.

Search engines interpret a ’301′ code as a link that has permanently moved to another destination. 301 redirection is the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect users to new website destinations and avoid running into page errors when following an old link.

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

You can site using a WordPress redirection plugin 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 issues and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up 301 redirects using redirection plugins or get professional assistance)

Congratulations! Now you know how to configure your WordPress site to display SEO-friendly URLs for your posts and improve your search search rankings. To learn more about using Permalinks, see the WordPress codex here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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