Wouldn’t it be great if you could add content to your WordPress website or blog, and the following would then take place … all from your page address:

• Readers could quickly gain an understanding of what the content is about,
• Search engines could easily find your page and correctly classify its content to improve your search rankings,
• Each content item created on your site would have a unique identifier, making your site easier to manage.

Well, with WordPress permalinks you can!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

What’s A Permalink?

A permalink is the permanent URL to your individual WordPress posts, categories and other taxonomies (a way to organize things together) like archives.

A permalink is the web address that other people will use to link to articles or sections of your site or the links you send in an email pointing readers to posts on your site. Some people also call permalinks “pretty” URLs.

Permalinks make the web address pointing to each post on your website permanent, hence a permalink.

Why Do You Need To Use Permalinks?

Hopefully, you are probably aware by now that, WordPress is one of the best Content Management Systems you can use when it comes to SEO.

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

If you focus on the SEO aspect of your site, then you cannot ignore the importance of your site’s URLs. Search engines like Google tend to pay special attention to the structure of a site’s URLs when indexing pages.

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

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

By default, a WordPress installation uses a URL structure for your posts that isn’t very search engine friendly and looks like this …

The link structure shown above is used by WordPress to find information within its database. It doesn’t really mean much to anyone, and it doesn’t help your site with on-site SEO.

As the screenshot image taken directly from Google search listings below shows, many WordPress users have not yet configured their permalinks …

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

To get the best SEO benefit from using 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 gives you the ability to create a custom URL structure for your published and archived posts, so your pages can go from something that is non-SEO friendly like this …

To something like this …

Out of the box, WordPress URLs are not very search engine-friendly. In this step-by-step tutorial, you will learn how to configure your permalinks in WordPress to help your content rank better in search engines.

How To Change WordPress Permalinks

In your WordPress administration menu, click on 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 a search engine friendly URL instead for our posts. To do this, we will need to specify a different Permalink structure than the default.

Common Settings – Permalinks

In the Common Settings section, select Custom Structure, then add one or more ‘tags’ (see below) to create search engine-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/river-cruises/river-cruise-holiday-bargains

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=7681

(Using permalinks helps readers and search engines understand what the content is about)

Search Engine-Friendly Tags

“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, four digits (e.g. ‘2010’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘09’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘31’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘05’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘45’)
• %second% – The exact second your post is published (e.g. ‘42’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘7391’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted version of your post title. For example, if the post title is “Top Five Budget Travel Tips!”, the postname tag will convert this into “top-five-budget-travel-tips” (all lower case letters and no exclamation symbols) in the URL. Tip: You can always edit this wording 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 ‘Custom Structure’ and using the /%postname%/ tag.

Optional Permalink Settings

This section lets you configure custom structures for your category and tag archive page URLs.

You can change 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, changing your category base to “news” will display your category links as ‘http://domain.com/news/category_name/’.

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

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

To something like this …

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

Remember to save your changes when 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 – Additional Info

Set Up Your Categories

To get the greatest 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 plugin developer Joost de Valk, here are some points to keep in mind if you are wondering whether or not to add categories to your permalinks:

• If your domain is short and your category 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 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 category vs no category there is no perfect 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 detailed information about WordPress categories in other articles.

Create Timeless Posts

Another tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your website provides news, or you have a special reason to add dates to your post URLs, it’s best to avoid selecting date-based permalink syntax when setting up your site’s URLs.

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

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

What If My Blog Has Published Posts?

Normally, your site’s permalinks should be configured when you install a new WordPress site. This should be part of your website planning process.

If your website has been running for a while or your site already has a lot of posts indexed in the search engines and you want to change the permalink structure, make sure that this is something that absolutely needs doing, as changing permalinks after your site has already been going for a while could create issues and loss of traffic.

Add 301 Redirection

As you’ve seen earlier, many website owners (or their web developers) are unaware of the search-friendly URLs feature of WordPress.

Maybe when you started, your site used the default WordPress URL structure and now you would like to improve your SEO. Maybe your site was originally set up to display post dates in your URLs and now all of your content is perceived as being outdated and you want to delete the date tags in your URLs.

To change your URL structure without impacting your site’s SEO in a negative way you will need to add ‘301 redirects’ to reassign links that use the previous permalinks structure to page URLs that use the new permalinks syntax.

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

To effectively change your syntax and avoid damaging your search rankings, sending visitors to broken links, etc. you should install and set up your redirection system before changing the permalink structure of your site.

You can site or blog using a redirection plugin like Simple 301 Redirects, or Redirection, or use the services of a professional to assist you with setting up and redirecting your permalinks correctly to avoid any problems and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up URL redirections using redirection plugins or use the services of a professional)

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

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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