Wouldn’t it be great if you could publish a new post on your WordPress site, and the following would then take place … all from your URL:

• Users could easily understand what the content was about,
• Google would be able to discover your pages faster,
• Every single content item published on your website or blog would have its own unique ID, making your site easier to manage.

Well, with permalinks this can easily be done!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – Definition

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 other people use to link to your posts or sections of your site or the links you send in emails 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 perma-link.

Why Use Permalinks?

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

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

If you are looking to optimize the SEO aspect of your site or blog, then you should not ignore the importance of your site’s URLs. Google places considerable weight on the structure of your site’s URLs when indexing site pages.

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

Now … let’s review why you should use permalinks when publishing content in WordPress.

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

The above link structure is used by WordPress to locate information inside your database. It does not mean much to anyone, and it doesn’t help your website with on-site SEO.

As you can see from the screenshot image below taken directly from Google search results, many WordPress site owners haven’t configured their sites to publish search optimized content …

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

To get the best possible SEO benefit out of using and improve your site’s rankings, you should configure your permalinks structure to make it more SEO-friendly by displaying relevant keywords in your URL, instead of meaningless characters.

WordPress offers you the ability to create a custom URL structure for your published and archived posts, so your content can easily go from something that is non-SEO friendly like this …

To this …

In this step-by-step tutorial, you will learn how to set up the Permalinks section of your WordPress site to display posts with SEO-friendly URLs instead of the default linking structure and help every new post you publish automatically get better indexing in Google.

Changing Your WordPress Permalinks

In your WordPress dashboard 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 default one.

Common Settings

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 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/travel-europe/cruise-holiday-deals

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=577

(Using post name permalinks helps readers understand what the page is about)

Adding Pretty URL Tags In Custom Structure

“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% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘10’)
• %day% – The day your post is published (e.g. ‘06’)
• %hour% – The hour your post is published (e.g. ‘04’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘48’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘09’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘5797’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted version of the post title. For example, if your post title is ”It Ain’t Worth Doin’ No More!”, the postname tag will convert this into “it-aint-worth-doin-no-more” (all lower case characters and no exclamation symbols) in the URL. Tip: You can always edit the URL text in the post slug field on the Add/Edit Post/Page screens.
• %category% – A sanitized 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 ‘Custom Structure’.

Optional Permalink Settings

If you need to configure custom structures for your category and tag page URLs you can do this in this section.

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 the optional settings fields blank the defaults will be used.

Remember to save any 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 optimal benefit out of 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 or not to add categories to your permalinks:

• If 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 share and decrease the SEO benefit.
• 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 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 site’s web addresses short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We provide more information about WordPress categories in other tutorials.

Avoid Using URL Structures That Date Your Content

Another useful tip from Joost de Valk is that unless you plan to run a news website or you have a special reason to date your content, it’s best to avoid choosing date-based permalink syntax when configuring your blog’s URLs.

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

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 An Established Blog?

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

If your website has been running for a while 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 up and running for a while could create issues and errors.

301 Redirection

As you’ve seen in earlier screenshots, some site owners (or whoever set up their site) seem to be completely unaware of the SEO-friendly URLs feature of WordPress.

Maybe when you started, your site used the default WordPress permalinks and now you want to optimize your site better for search engines. Perhaps your website or blog was configured to display post dates in your URLs and now all of your posts are perceived as being outdated and you want to delete the date portion in your URLs.

To edit your permalink structure without negatively affecting your site’s SEO or rankings you will need to add ‘301 redirects’ to reassign all links using the previous permalinks structure to page URLs using the new syntax.

A ’301′ code is interpreted by search engines as a link that has permanently moved elsewhere. 301 redirection is the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect visitors to new web page destinations and avoid ”page not found” errors if following an old link.

To create an effective syntax change and avoid damaging your search rankings, sending visitors to broken links, etc. you will need to set up your redirection system before messing with the permalink structure of your site.

You can site using a WP 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 any issues and troubleshoot any errors.

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

Congratulations! Now you know about the built-in system WordPress uses to display search engine-friendly URLs for your posts. To learn more about using Permalinks, refer to the official WordPress documentation here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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