Wouldn’t it be great if you could simply add new content to your site, and the following took place … all from your web address:

• Potential visitors could glean what your post was about,
• Search engines could find your posts faster,
• Each post added to your site would have a unique identifier, making things easier to manage.

Well, with WordPress permalinks you can easily do this!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalink – What Is It?

Permalinks are the permanent URLs to your individual posts, categories and other taxonomies (a way to organize things together) like archives.

A permalink is the web address that people and search engines use to link to articles or sections of your site or the links you send in emails pointing readers to articles on your site. Permalinks are often called “pretty” URLs.

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

Why Use Permalinks?

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

WordPress is not only well optimized right out of the box, but the SEO aspect can be considerably improved with excellent SEO plugins.

If you are looking to optimize the SEO aspect of your site or blog, then you should not ignore the importance of your URLs. Search engines like Google tend to give special consideration to the structure of URLs when indexing content.

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

Now … let’s turn our attention to the reason why you should use 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 locate information inside its database. It doesn’t really mean anything to either visitors or search engines, and it doesn’t help your site with on-site search engine optimization.

As the screenshot below shows, many WordPress site owners haven’t yet set up their permalinks to publish search optimized content …

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

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

WordPress lets you create a custom URL structure for your published posts, so your content can go from something that is non-SEO friendly like this …

To something like this …

By default, WordPress post URLs are not very SEO-friendly. This step-by-step tutorial explains how to configure your WP permalinks to automatically get better indexing in search engines.

Setting Up Your WordPress Permalinks

In your WordPress admin 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 search engine friendly URLs 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 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/budget-cruises/river-cruise-holiday-deals

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=3028

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

SEO-Friendly Tags

“Pretty” permalinks, 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. ‘2015’)
• %monthnum% – The month your post is published (e.g. ‘11’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘02’)
• %hour% – The hour the post gets published (e.g. ‘17’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘07’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘23’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘1641’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of the 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 characters and removed punctuation symbols) in the URL. Tip: You can 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 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

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

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

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

For example, changing your category base to “news” would make your category links display as ‘http://domain.com/news/category_name/’.

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

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

To this …

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

Remember to save any 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 – Additional Notes

Use Descriptive Categories

To get the most benefit out of using Permalinks, remember 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 some points to consider if you are wondering whether you should add categories to your permalinks or not:

• 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 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 share and reduce the SEO benefit.
• Do you plan to post content under only one category or multiple categories? If you are going to post content under multiple categories, then we recommend not using the category tag in your permalink structure.

Ultimately, when it comes to category vs no category there really is no perfect permalink structure to use. Choose a permalink structure you think will suit your needs best. SEO experts recommend making your web address short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We cover WordPress categories in other tutorials.

Avoid Time-Stamping Permalink Syntax

Another useful tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your website provides news or time-specific information, or there is a special reason why you need to create dated post URLs, it’s best to avoid using date-based permalink options for your URLs.

(Avoid using permalinks that date your posts)

Although setting up permalinks that date your content may be considered better that using no permalinks at all from an SEO perspective, people are less likely to click on posts that are a couple of years old, even if the content is relevant to the answers they are searching for.

Changing Permalinks In Site With Indexed Posts

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

If your site 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 doing so could create issues and loss of traffic.

301 Redirection

As you’ve seen in the above screenshots of actual search results, many website owners (or their web developers) seem to be unaware of the SEO-friendly URLs feature of WordPress.

Maybe when you started out, your site used the default WordPress URL structure and now you want to improve your SEO. Maybe your site was originally set up to display post dates in your URLs and now all of your posts are showing as being old and you want to remove the date tags in the permalinks.

The best way to modify your URL structure without negatively affecting your site’s SEO is to use ‘301 redirections’ to point links that use the previous URL structure to web URLs using the new structure.

A code ‘301’ is interpreted by search engines as a link that has permanently been relocated. 301 redirection is the most efficient and search engine friendly way to redirect visitors to new site destinations and avoid running into page errors when following an old link.

To create an effective syntax change and avoid SEO problems, sending visitors to error pages, etc. you should install and set up a redirection system before messing with 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 help you set up and redirect your permalinks correctly to avoid issues and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up URL redirections using redirection plugins or get professional help)

Congratulations! Now you know how to change your site’s permalinks to display search engine-friendly URLs for your posts and improve your search search rankings. For additional information on using Permalinks, see the WordPress codex below:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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