Wouldn’t it be great if you could just add a new post to your WordPress site, and the following took place … all from your post URL:

• Visitors could easily glean what your post was about,
• Google would easily find your pages and correctly classify their content to improve your search rankings,
• Each content item you create on your website would have its own unique identifier, making your site easier to manage.

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

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – Definition

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

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

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

Why Do You Need To Use Permalinks?

As you are probably aware, WordPress is one of the best Content Management Systems available when it comes to publishing search engines optimized content.

WordPress is not only well optimized right out of the box, but the SEO aspect can be considerably finetuned using SEO plugins.

If you are looking to optimize the SEO aspect of your site, then you should not ignore the importance of your URLs. Search engines like Google place considerable weight on the URL structure of your site.

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

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

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

WordPress uses the above link structure with a string query to locate data inside its database. It does not mean anything to either search engines or visitors, and it doesn’t help your website with on-site SEO.

As the screenshot taken directly from Google search listings below shows, many WordPress site owners haven’t yet configured their sites to use WordPress permalinks …

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

To get the best possible SEO benefit from using and improve your site’s rankings, you will want to make sure to 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 allows you to create a custom URL structure for your published posts, so your content can easily go from this …

To something like this …

By default, WordPress post URLs are not very SEO-friendly. In this step-by-step tutorial, you will learn how to set up your WP permalinks to automatically get better indexing in Google.

Configuring WordPress Permalinks

In your WordPress admin menu, select 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.

Permalinks - Common Settings

In the Common Settings section, select Custom Structure, then add one or more ‘tags’ (see below) to create SEO-friendly URLs …

(Configure 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/10-favorite-european-river-cruises

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=2390

(Using post name permalinks helps visitors understand what your post is about)

Permalink Tags

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

• %year% – The year of the post, four digits (e.g. ‘2014’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘05’)
• %day% – The day your post gets published (e.g. ‘04’)
• %hour% – The hour your post gets published (e.g. ‘19’)
• %minute% – The minute your post gets published (e.g. ‘55’)
• %second% – The exact second the post is published (e.g. ‘13’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘4029’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of your post title. For example, if your 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 letters and no punctuation symbols) in the URL. Tip: You can always edit the URL wording 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 adding the /%postname%/ tag in ‘Custom Structure’.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

In this section, you can enter custom structures for your tag and category archive pages.

You can change 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 “recipes” as your category base will display your category links as ‘http://domain.com/recipes/uncategorized/’.

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

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

To something like this …

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

Remember to save any changes when 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 – Additional Info

Categories

To get the best possible SEO benefit out of using Permalinks, it’s important 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 consider 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 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 category vs no category there really is no perfect permalink structure to use. Use a permalink structure that you think will suit your needs 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 Date-Based URLs

Another tip from Joost de Valk is that unless you plan to run a news website or blog or there is a special reason why you need to create dated website URLs, it’s best to avoid selecting date-based permalink options when setting up your site’s URLs.

(Avoid setting up permalinks that date your content)

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 Blog Has Lots Of Indexed Posts?

Normally, it’s best to configure your site’s permalinks 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 many posts 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 already been going for a while could create issues and errors.

Add 301 Redirection

As you’ve seen in the above screenshots of actual search results, some WordPress users (or whoever set up their site) are completely unaware of the search-friendly URLs feature of WordPress.

Maybe when you started, your site used the default WordPress URL structure and now you want to improve your site’s SEO. Maybe your website was originally set up to display post dates in your URLs and now all of your content is showing as being two or three years old and you want to remove the date tags in your URLs.

The best way to modify your URL structure without negatively affecting your site’s SEO or rankings is to use ‘301 redirects’ to reassign all links using the old permalink syntax to URLs that use the new permalinks structure.

A code ‘301’ is interpreted by search engines as a link that has been permanently moved to another destination. 301 redirects are the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect visitors to new site destinations and avoid ‘404’ (Page not found) errors if they click on an old link.

To create an effective permalink structure change and avoid SEO problems, sending visitors to error pages, etc. you should set up your 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 issues and troubleshoot any errors.

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

Congratulations! Now you know how to change your permalinks to display SEO-friendly URLs for your posts. To learn more about using Permalinks, see the official WordPress documentation here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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