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

• Potential site visitors could understand what your page was about,
• Google would be able to easily find your post and correctly index your content to improve your search results,
• Each item of content added to your website or blog would have its own unique ID, making your site easier to manage.

Well, with permalinks you can!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – Definition

Permalinks are the permanent URLs to an individual WordPress post, category, or other taxonomy (a way to group things together) like archives.

A permalink is the web address that visitors and search engines use to link to your posts or sections of your site or the links you send in emails pointing readers to a specific item of content on your blog. Some people also call permalinks “pretty” URLs.

Permalinks make the URLs to each post on your website permanent, hence a perma-link.

Why Use Permalinks?

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

WordPress is not only well optimized straight out of the box, but its SEO aspect can be considerably fine tuned using SEO plugins.

If you focus on the SEO aspect of your site, then you should not ignore the importance of your site’s URLs. Search engines like Google tend to give special consideration to the structure of URLs when indexing its pages.

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

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

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

WordPress uses the above link with a string query to locate data within its database. It does not help your website with on-site SEO.

As you can see from the screenshot image below taken from Google search listings, many site owners are still using out-of-the-box settings when publishing content …

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

To get greater SEO benefit from using WordPress and improve your site’s rankings, you should set up your permalinks structure to make it more SEO-friendly by displaying relevant keywords in your URL, instead of meaningless characters.

WordPress allows you to create a custom URL structure for your published and archived posts, so your content can go from this …

To this …

In this step-by-step tutorial, you will learn how to configure your WordPress permalinks to display your posts using search engine-friendly URLs instead of the default linking structure and help every new post you add to your site or blog get better indexing in Google.

How To Configure WordPress Permalinks

In your WordPress dashboard click on, 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 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.

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/travel-tips/cruise-holiday-bargains

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=7680

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

How To Create Search Engine-Friendly Tags In WordPress

“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, four digits (e.g. ‘2012’)
• %monthnum% – The month the post gets published (e.g. ‘09’)
• %day% – The day your post is published (e.g. ‘05’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘18’)
• %minute% – The minute your post gets published (e.g. ‘44’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘60’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘3766’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted version of your post title. For example, if the post title is ”Ten Signs That You’re About To Get Fired From Your Job!”, the postname tag will convert this into “ten-signs-that-youre-about-to-get-fired-from-your-job” (all lower case letters and removed 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 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’ option.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

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

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

• 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/category_name/’.

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

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

To this …

If you leave the 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 – Tips

Categories

To get greater SEO benefit from using Permalinks, it’s important 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 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 you should add categories to your permalink structure or not:

• If your category name 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 or 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 we recommend not using the category tag in your permalink structure.

Ultimately, when it comes to using category vs no category there really is no perfect permalink structure to use. Choose a permalink structure that you think will suit your site best. Your web addresses should be short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We cover WordPress categories in other tutorials.

Avoid Setting Up Permalinks That Time-Stamp Your Content

Another useful tip from Joost de Valk is that unless you plan to run a news website or blog or you have a special reason to add dates to your post URLs, avoid choosing date-based permalink syntax when setting up your URLs.

(Avoid setting up URL structures that date your content)

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

Changing Permalinks In An Established Site

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

If your website or blog has been running for a while or your site already has many posts 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 can create issues and loss of traffic.

Use 301 Redirection

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

Maybe you started out using the default WordPress permalinks and now you want to improve your site’s SEO. Perhaps your website was configured to display post dates in your web address and now all of your posts are showing as being two or three years old and you want to remove the date portion in the permalinks.

The best way to modify your URL structure without affecting your site’s SEO or existing rankings in a negative way is to use ‘301 redirects’ to point links using the previous permalink syntax to destinations that use the new permalinks syntax.

Search engines interpret a code ‘301’ as a link that has permanently moved to another location. 301 redirection is the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect users to new web page destinations and avoid ”page not found” errors when following an old link.

To create an effective permalink syntax change and avoid damaging your search rankings, sending visitors to error pages, etc. you will need to install and set up a redirection system before changing the permalink structure of your site.

You can WP site or blog using a plugin like Simple 301 Redirects, or Redirection, or get 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 plugins or use the services of a professional)

Congratulations! Now you know how to change your blog’s permalinks to display SEO-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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