Wouldn’t it be great if you could just add new content to your WordPress website, and the following would then take place … just from your page address:

• New visitors could gain an understanding of what your content was about,
• Search engines would be able to find your pages faster,
• Every piece of content created on your website would have its own unique ID, making things easier to manage.

Well, with WordPress permalinks this is very easy to do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – Definition

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 web address that others will use to link to posts or sections of your site or the links you send in emails pointing to a particular post on your blog. Permalinks are often called “pretty” URLs.

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

Permalinks – Why Use Them?

As you have probably heard by now, 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 can help to enhance its SEO aspect further.

If you focus on the SEO aspect of your site, then you cannot ignore the importance of your URLs. Google tends 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 turn our attention to why it’s best to use permalinks when publishing content in WordPress.

By default, a WordPress installation uses a link-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 SEO.

As the screenshot below shows, many WordPress users haven’t set up their permalinks …

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

To get greater SEO benefit from using WordPress and improve your site’s traffic results, you should set up your permalinks structure to make it more SEO-friendly by displaying relevant keywords in your URL, instead of meaningless characters.

WordPress allows you to create a custom URL structure for your published posts, so your pages can go from this …

To something with an SEO-friendly URL like this …

In this tutorial, you will learn how to configure your WordPress permalinks to display posts using search engine-friendly URLs instead of the default URL structure and help every new post you add get better indexing in search engines like Google.

Setting Up Your WordPress Permalinks

Log into your WordPress admin area 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 “pretty” permalinks 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 SEO-friendly URLs …

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

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=3766

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

Creating SEO-Friendly Tags In WordPress

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

• %year% – The year your post is published, four digits (e.g. ‘2015’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘02’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘10’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘14’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘27’)
• %second% – The exact second the post is published (e.g. ‘10’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘1208’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted version of your 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 punctuation symbols deleted) in the URL. Tip: You can edit the words in your post title 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 selecting the ‘Custom Structure’ setting and using the /%postname%/ tag.

Optional Permalink Settings

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

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

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

For example, changing your category base to “news” would make your category links display as ‘http://domain.com/news/category_name/’.

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

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

To this …

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

Remember to save any changes when 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 the best 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 plugin developer Joost de Valk, here are some things to keep in mind if you are wondering whether you should add categories to your permalink structure or not:

• If your domain is short and 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 copy and decrease 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 it’s recommended that you do not use the category tag in your permalink structure.

Ultimately, when it comes to category vs no category there is no ideal permalink structure to use. Use the 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 Time-Stamping Permalinks

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

(Avoid setting up permalinks that date your content)

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

Changing Your Permalink Structure In Site With Published Content

Normally, it’s best to configure your permalinks 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 something that absolutely needs doing, as making changes to permalinks after your site has been running for a while could create SEO issues and loss of traffic.

301 Redirects

As you’ve seen in earlier screenshots, many WordPress users (or whoever set up their site) are completely unaware of the SEO-friendly URLs feature of WordPress.

Maybe when you started out, your site used the default WordPress URL structure and now you would like to optimize your site better for search engines. Perhaps 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 remove the date tags in the URLs.

To change your permalink structure without impacting your site’s SEO in a negative way you will need to use ‘301 redirects’ to point links set up using the previous URL structure to destinations using the new structure.

A code ‘301’ is interpreted by search engines as a link that has permanently been relocated. 301 redirects are the most efficient and search engine friendly way to redirect users to new website destinations and avoid running into ”page not found” errors if clicking on an old link.

To create an effective permalink structure 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 site using a WP 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 a WordPress plugin or get professional assistance)

Congratulations! Now you know how to set up your permalinks to display search engine-friendly URLs for your posts and improve your search search rankings. To learn more about using Permalinks, refer to the WordPress codex here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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