Wouldn’t it be great if after publishing a new post on your WordPress site, the following happened … all from your URL:

• Users could glean what your post is about,
• Google would easily find your post and correctly index the content to improve your search rankings,
• Each content item created on your website would have a unique identifier, making your site easier to manage.

Well, this is what permalinks let you do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalink – What Is It?

Permalinks are the permanent URLs to an individual WordPress post, category, or other taxonomy (a way to group things together) like archives.

A permalink is the URL that others use to link to your articles or sections of your site or the links you send in emails pointing readers to articles on your site. Permalinks are often called “pretty” URLs.

Permalinks make the web address pointing to each post on your blog permanent, hence a perma-link.

Why Do You Need To Use Permalinks?

Hopefully, you probably know by now that, WordPress is one of the best CMS tools 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 can help to improve its SEO aspect considerably.

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

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

Now … let’s turn our attention to the reason why you should set up 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 link with a string query shown above to locate data within your 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 listings, many WordPress users have not set up their permalinks …

Although Google is clearly still indexing the above sites, these site owners are missing out on additional SEO benefits.

To get more SEO benefit out of using and improve your site’s rankings, you should set up your permalinks structure to make it more SEO-friendly by displaying relevant keywords in your URL, instead of meaningless numbers and symbols.

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

To something like this …

Out of the box, WordPress URLs are not very SEO-friendly. In this tutorial, you will learn how to configure your WP permalinks to display posts using SEO-friendly URLs.

Setting Up WordPress Permalinks

Log into your WordPress dashboard and click on Settings > Permalinks …

This brings 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 search engine friendly URL instead for our posts. To do this, we will need to specify a different Permalink structure than the default.

Common Settings – Permalinks

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

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=1167

(Using permalinks helps readers and search engines understand what your 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, four digits (e.g. ‘2017’)
• %monthnum% – The month the post is published (e.g. ‘10’)
• %day% – The day your post gets published (e.g. ‘18’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘11’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘52’)
• %second% – The exact second your post is published (e.g. ‘49’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘2723’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of the 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 removed exclamation symbols) in the URL. Tip: You can edit the wording 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 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 using the /%postname%/ tag.

Optional Permalink Settings

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

You can change the ‘base’ tag or category URLs using the following syntax:

• 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/category_name/’.

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

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

To this …

If you leave the optional settings fields blank WordPress uses the defaults.

Remember to save your changes when 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 – Tips

Categories

To get the best benefit out of 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 some 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 is short and descriptive (e.g. uses a relevant keyword or keyword phrase), 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 copy and decrease the SEO benefit.
• If you plan 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 adding 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 post URLs short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We provide more information about WordPress categories in other articles.

Avoid Using Time-Specific Permalinks

Another tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your aim is to run a news blog or you have any special reason to add dates to your post URLs, it’s best to avoid using date-based permalink options for your blog’s URLs.

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

Although using URL structures that date your posts is better that using no permalinks at all from an SEO aspect, people are less likely to click on posts that are several years old, even if the content is relevant to what they are searching for.

What If My Site Has Lots Of Published Content?

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 site is already established or your site already has a lot of content indexed in the search engines and you would like to change the permalink structure, make sure that this is really necessary, as doing so can create SEO issues and errors.

301 Redirects

As you’ve seen earlier, some WordPress users (or their web developers) are unaware of the search-friendly URLs feature of WordPress.

Maybe you started out using the default WordPress permalinks and now you want to optimize your site better for search engines. Perhaps your site was configured to display post dates in your web address and now all of your content is perceived as being outdated and you want to remove the date tags in your URLs.

To modify your URL structure without affecting your site’s SEO in a negative way you should use ‘301 redirects’ to point all links that use the old URL syntax to page URLs that use the new structure.

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

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

You can site using WP redirection plugins like Simple 301 Redirects, or Redirection, or get a professional to help you set up and redirect your permalinks correctly to avoid issues and troubleshoot any errors.

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

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

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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