Wouldn’t it be great if you could simply publish content on your WordPress website, and the following happened … just from your URL:

• Site visitors could easily understand what the page is about,
• Google would be able to discover your posts faster,
• Every single piece of content added to your website would have a unique identifier, making your site easier to manage.

Well, this is what a WordPress permalink lets you do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalink – What Is It?

A permalink is the permanent URL to an individual WordPress post, category, or other taxonomy (a way to group things together) like archives.

A permalink is the URL that others will use to link to your posts or sections of your site or the links you send in emails pointing readers to content items on your blog. Some people also refer to permalinks as “pretty” URLs.

Permalinks make the URLs to each post on your website permanent, hence a permalink.

Why Do You Need To 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 great for SEO out of the box, but there are SEO plugins you can install that will help to finetune its SEO aspect further.

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

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

Now … let’s review the reason why you should configure your permalinks 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 structure with a string query to locate information inside its database. It does not help your website with on-site search engine optimization.

As the screenshot image taken directly from Google search listings below shows, many WordPress users are still using out of the box permalink settings when publishing their content …

Although Google is still indexing the above sites, the owners of these sites are potentially missing out on extra SEO benefits.

To get greater SEO benefit from using and improve your site’s rankings, you should set up 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 content can easily go from this …

To this …

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

Configuring Your WordPress Permalinks

Log into your WP admin and select Settings > Permalinks …

This will bring 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 a “pretty” permalink instead for our posts. To do this, we will need to specify a different Permalink structure than the default one.

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 …

(Change 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-europe/how-to-save-money-on-cruise-travel

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=6612

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

Creating Pretty WordPress URLs

“Pretty” permalinks, 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. ‘2014’)
• %monthnum% – The month your post gets published (e.g. ‘02’)
• %day% – The day the post gets published (e.g. ‘31’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘09’)
• %minute% – The minute the post is published (e.g. ‘32’)
• %second% – The exact second the post gets published (e.g. ‘58’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘2357’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted version of the post title. For example, if the 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 marks) 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 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 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 adding the /%postname%/ tag in the ‘Custom Structure’ setting.

Optional Permalink Settings

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

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

• domain.com/category_base/category_name
• domain.com/tag_base/tag_name

For example, using “topics” as your category base will display your category links as ‘http://domain.com/topics/category_name/’.

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

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

To this …

If you leave these fields blank the default settings 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 more benefit out of using Permalinks, you will need 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 things to consider if you are wondering whether or not to add categories to your permalink structure:

• If your category name is short and descriptive (e.g. uses a relevant keyword or keyword phrase), 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.
• If you are going 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 is no ”better” permalink structure to use. Choose the permalink structure that you think will suit your needs best. SEO experts recommend making your post URLs short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We provide more information about WordPress categories in other articles.

Make Your Posts Timeless

Another useful tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your aim is to run a news site or there is a special reason why you need to date your content, it’s best to avoid choosing date-based permalink settings when configuring your site’s URLs.

(Avoid using URL structures that time-stamp your posts)

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

What If My Site Already Has Lots Of Content?

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

If your website or blog 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 really necessary, as doing so could create SEO issues and errors.

Use 301 Redirects

As you’ve seen earlier, some WordPress site owners (or whoever set up their site) are completely unaware of the search-friendly URLs feature of WordPress.

Maybe you started out using the default WordPress URL structure and now you would like to improve your site’s SEO. Perhaps your website or blog 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 tags of the permalinks.

The best way to edit your permalinks without affecting your site’s SEO or rankings in a negative way is to use ‘301 redirections’ to point all links set up using the old permalink structure to links using the new permalink structure.

A code ‘301’ is interpreted by search engines as a link that has permanently moved. 301 redirects are the most efficient and search engine friendly way to redirect visitors to new website destinations and avoid page errors if following an old link.

To effectively change your syntax and avoid damaging your search rankings, sending visitors to error pages, etc. you will need to configure a redirection system before changing the permalink structure of your site.

You can site 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 problems and troubleshoot any errors.

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

Congratulations! Now you know how to configure your blog to display search engine-friendly URLs for your posts. For additional information on using Permalinks, refer to the official WordPress documentation here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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