Wouldn’t it be great if you could just publish content on your site, and the following would then happen … all from your page URL:

• Potential site visitors could easily gain an understanding of what your page was about,
• Search engines could easily find your pages and correctly index their content for better search results,
• Every single post you create on your website or blog would have its own unique ID, making things easier to manage.

Well, with permalinks this is really easy to do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – Definition

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

A permalink is the URL that other people will use to link to articles or sections of your site or the links you send in an email pointing to a specific post on your website. Some people also call permalinks “pretty” URLs.

Permalinks make the URL pointing to each post on your site permanent, hence a perma-link.

Permalinks – Why Use Them?

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

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

If you are looking to optimize the SEO aspect of your site or blog, then you cannot ignore the importance of its site’s URLs. Search engines like Google place considerable weight on the URL structure of a site.

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 the reason why it’s best to use permalinks if publishing content in WordPress.

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

The above link structure is used by WordPress to locate data inside its database. It does not help your website with on-site search engine optimization.

As you can see from the screenshot below, many WordPress site owners are still using default settings when publishing their content …

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

To get the greatest SEO benefit out of using and improve your site’s traffic results, you will want to make sure to 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 lets you create a custom URL structure for your published and archived posts, so your content can go from this …

To something like this …

By default, WordPress post URLs are not very search engine-friendly. This tutorial explains how to set up your permalinks in WordPress to automatically help your content get better indexing in search engines like Google.

How To Set Up WordPress Permalinks

In your WordPress admin 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 search engine friendly URLs 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 search engine-friendly URLs …

(Configure 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/3-best-european-river-cruise-destinations

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=8055

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

How To Use Permalink Tags In WordPress

“Pretty” URLs, or SEO-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. ‘2013’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘11’)
• %day% – The day the post gets published (e.g. ‘07’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘16’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘12’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘24’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘6423’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted version of your post title. For example, if your 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 letters converted to lower case and no exclamation marks) in the URL. Tip: You can edit the words in your post titles 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 choosing ‘Custom Structure’ and adding the /%postname%/ tag.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

In this section, you can set up custom structures for your tag and category page URLs.

This changes 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 “travel” as your category base would display your category links as ‘http://domain.com/travel/category_name/’.

So, if you make the following change in your permalinks Optional > Category base settings field …

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

To something like this …

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

Remember to save any 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 Information

Categories

To get the maximum SEO benefit from using Permalinks, it’s important 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 a few points to keep in mind if you are wondering whether you should add categories to your permalinks or not:

• If your category slug is short and descriptive (e.g. adds a relevant keyword or keyword phrase to your URL), you may want to use the category tag 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 plan to post content under multiple categories, then we recommend not using 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 site best and that will make your site’s web addresses short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We provide detailed information about WordPress categories in other articles.

Don’t Use Date Permalinks

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 URLs, it’s best to avoid selecting date-based permalink options when setting up your blog’s URLs.

(Avoid setting up permalinks that date your content)

People are less likely to click on a post that is a couple of years old, even if the content is relevant to the answers they are searching for.

What If My Blog Has Published Posts?

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

If your site has been running for a while or your site already has a lot of content 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 been up and running for a while can create issues and loss of traffic.

Use 301 Redirection

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

Maybe you started out using the default WordPress permalinks and now you would like to improve your SEO. Perhaps your site was originally set up to display post dates in your web address and now all of your posts are perceived as being out-of-date and you want to remove the date portion in your URLs.

To change your URL structure without negatively affecting your site’s SEO you will need to add ‘301 redirections’ to reassign links that use the old permalinks syntax to URLs using the new permalinks structure.

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

To create an effective syntax change and avoid SEO problems, sending visitors to broken links, etc. you should install and set up a 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 get a professional to help you set up and redirect your permalinks correctly to avoid any problems and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up 301 redirects using redirection 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 and improve your search results. For additional information on using Permalinks, refer to the WordPress codex here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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