Wouldn’t it be great if you could simply add content to your WordPress website, and the following happened … just from your page address:

• Potential visitors could tell what your content was about,
• Search engines would easily find your post and correctly index its content to improve your search results,
• Every item of content on your website or blog would have its own unique identifier, making things easier to manage.

Well, this is what WordPress permalinks let you do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – Definition

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 URL that others use to link to your posts or sections of your site or the links you send in emails pointing to content items on your blog. Permalinks are often called “pretty” URLs.

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

Permalinks – Why Do We Need To Use Them?

Hopefully, by now 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 well optimized straight out of the box, but there are excellent SEO plugins you can install that will help to finetune its SEO aspect considerably.

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

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

Now … let’s see the reason why you may need to use permalinks if publishing content in WordPress.

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

WordPress uses the link with a string query shown above to locate information within its database. It doesn’t really help your website with on-site search engine optimization.

As you can see from the screenshot below taken directly from Google search results, many WordPress users are still using out of the box permalink settings when publishing their content online …

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

To get optimal SEO benefit from using WordPress and improve your site’s rankings, you should 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 allows you to create a custom URL structure for your published and archived posts, so your pages can easily go from something that is non-SEO friendly like this …

To something like this …

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

Changing Your WordPress Permalinks

In your WP dashboard menu, 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 a “pretty” permalink instead for our posts. To do this, we 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 …

(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/cruise-travel/river-cruise-holiday-deals

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=2549

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

Pretty Permalink Tags

“Pretty” permalinks, or SEO-friendly URLs, are created by adding one or more ‘tags’ in the Custom Structure field:

• %year% – The year the post gets published, displayed as four digits (e.g. ‘2011’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘02’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘12’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘05’)
• %minute% – The minute the post is published (e.g. ‘20’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘48’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘5903’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of the post title. For example, if your post title is ”Ten Best Hotels In Cote D’Azur!”, the postname tag will convert this into “ten-best-hotels-in-cote-dazur” (all lower case letters and removed punctuation marks) in the URL. Tip: You can 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 selecting the ‘Custom Structure’ option and using the /%postname%/ tag.

Optional Permalink Settings

If you need to configure custom structures for your category and tag pages here is where you would do this.

This changes the ‘base’ tag or category for your 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 would display your category links as ‘http://domain.com/recipes/uncategorized/’.

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

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

To this …

If you leave these fields blank the default settings will be used.

Remember to save your 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 maximum SEO benefit from using Permalinks, remember 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 expert Joost de Valk, here are a few things to consider if you are wondering whether you should add categories to your permalink structure or not:

• If your domain is short and your category name is short and descriptive (e.g. adds a relevant keyword or keyword phrase to your URL), 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 or copy and decrease 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.

Despite being the subject of intense debate in WordPress SEO circles, when it comes to adding category vs no category there is no ”better” permalink structure to use. Choose a permalink structure 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 another article.

Avoid Time-Specific Permalink Syntax

Another useful tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your aim is to run a news website or you have a special reason to create dated post URLs, avoid using date-based permalink syntax when setting up your URLs.

(Avoid using URL structures that date your posts)

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.

What About Changing Permalinks In An Established Blog?

Normally, your 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 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 absolutely something that needs to be done, as making changes to permalinks after your site has been up and running for a while can create issues and errors.

Use 301 Redirects

As you’ve seen in earlier screenshots, some WordPress site owners (or their web developers) seem to be unaware of the search-friendly URLs feature of WordPress.

Maybe when you started out, your site used the default WordPress URL structure and now you want to optimize your site better for search engines. Perhaps your website was configured to display post dates in your URLs and now all of your content is perceived as being out-of-date and you want to remove the date portion in the permalinks.

To edit your permalinks without impacting your site’s SEO in a negative way you will need to add ‘301 redirects’ to reassign links using the previous permalink syntax to page URLs using the new permalink structure.

A code ‘301’ is interpreted by search engines as a link that has permanently been moved to another destination. 301 redirection is the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect visitors to new web page destinations and avoid running into page errors when they click on an old link.

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

You can add a link redirection system to your do this using a redirection plugin like Simple 301 Redirects, or Redirection, or use the services of a professional to assist you with setting up and redirecting your permalinks correctly to avoid any issues and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up 301 redirections using redirection plugins or use the services of a professional)

Congratulations! Now you know about the built-in system WordPress uses to display SEO-friendly URLs for your posts and improve your search search rankings. For additional information on using Permalinks, refer to the official WordPress documentation below:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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