Wouldn’t it be great if after publishing a new page on your website or blog, the following took place … all from your post address:

• Visitors could easily assess what your page was about,
• Search engines could discover your pages faster,
• Every single piece of content on your site would have its own unique identifier, making your site easier to manage.

Well, this is what permalinks let you do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – Definition

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

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

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

Permalinks – Why Do We Need To Use Them?

As you are probably aware, WordPress is one of the best Content Management Systems available when it comes to SEO.

WordPress is not only well optimized right out of the box, but there are SEO plugins you can install that will help to enhance its SEO aspect.

If you focus on the SEO aspect of your website, then you should not ignore the importance of your site’s URLs. Search engines like Google place considerable weight on the structure of URLs when indexing its content.

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

Now … let’s turn our attention to why you should use permalinks in WordPress.

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

WordPress uses the above link structure to locate data within 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, many WordPress site owners are still using default settings when publishing content online …

Although these sites are still getting their content indexed on search engines, they are missing out on extra SEO benefits.

To get the best possible SEO benefit from using 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 allows you to create a custom URL structure for your published and archived posts, so your content can easily go from this …

To something with an SEO-friendly URL like this …

Out of the box, WordPress URLs are not very search engine-friendly. This step-by-step tutorial shows you how to configure your permalinks in WordPress to help your content rank better in search engines like Google.

Changing Your WordPress Permalinks

From your WP dashboard menu, 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 a “pretty” permalink instead for our posts. To do this, we will need to specify a different Permalink structure than the one set by default.

Common Permalink Settings

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

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=840

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

Permalink 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. ‘2012’)
• %monthnum% – The month your post is published (e.g. ‘11’)
• %day% – The day your post gets published (e.g. ‘04’)
• %hour% – The hour the post gets published (e.g. ‘16’)
• %minute% – The minute the post is published (e.g. ‘33’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘56’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘8366’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted version of the post title. For example, if the 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 characters converted to lower case and punctuation symbols deleted) 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 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 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 adding the /%postname%/ tag.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

If you need to set up custom permalinks for your tag and category page URLs you can do this in this section.

You can change 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 “topics” as your category base would display your category links as ‘http://domain.com/topics/category_name/’.

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

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 after 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 Info

Categories

To get greater benefit from 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 expert Joost de Valk, here are a few things 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 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 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 really is no ideal permalink structure to use. Choose a permalink structure that you think will suit your site best. Your post URLs should be short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We provide more information about WordPress categories in other tutorials.

Avoid Using Date-Based Permalink Syntax

Another great tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your website is a news site or there is a special reason why you need to add dates to your URLs, it’s best to avoid selecting date-based permalink settings for your site’s URLs.

(Avoid setting up permalinks that date your posts)

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

What If My Site Has Lots Of Published Posts?

Normally, your permalinks should be configured when you create a new WordPress site. This should be part of your site planning process.

If your website is already established or you have a lot of content already 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 up and running for a while could create SEO issues and errors.

Add 301 Redirects

As you’ve seen in the above screenshots of actual search results, some site owners (or whoever set up their site) seem to be unaware of the permalinks 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. Maybe your website or blog was configured to display post dates in your web address and now all of your posts are showing as being old and you want to delete the date portion of your URLs.

To change your permalink structure without affecting your site’s SEO or existing rankings in a negative way you will need to use ‘301 redirects’ to point links that use the old permalink syntax to links using the new permalink syntax.

Search engines interpret a code ‘301’ as a link that has permanently moved to another destination. 301 redirects are the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect users to new website destinations and avoid ”page not found” errors when clicking on an old link.

To create an effective permalink syntax change and avoid SEO problems, sending visitors to broken links, etc. you will need to install and set up your redirection system before changing the permalink structure of your site.

You can add a link redirection system to your site or blog using a WordPress redirection 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 redirection plugins or get professional assistance)

Congratulations! Now you know how to set up your blog to display search engine-friendly URLs for your posts. For additional information on using Permalinks, see the WordPress codex here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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