Wouldn’t it be great if you could just add a new page to your site, and the following would then take place … all from your web address:

• Potential visitors to your site could easily tell what the post is about,
• Search engines would be able to discover your pages faster,
• Every single post added to your site would have its own unique identifier, making your content easier to manage.

Well, this is what a permalink lets you do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

What Is A Permalink?

A permalink is the permanent URL to your individual WordPress posts, categories and other taxonomies (a way to organize things together) like archives.

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

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

Why Use Permalinks?

As you are probably aware, WordPress is one of the best Content Management Systems you can use 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 use that will help to fine tuned its SEO aspect further.

If you are looking to optimize the SEO aspect of your site or blog, then you should not ignore the importance of your site’s URLs. Google tends to pay special attention to the structure of URLs when indexing site pages.

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

Now … let’s see the reason why it’s best to configure your permalinks if publishing content in WordPress.

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

WordPress uses the above link with a string query to find information within its database. It does not help your website with on-site search engine optimization.

As the screenshot taken from Google search listings below shows, many site owners haven’t configured their permalinks to publish search optimized content online …

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

To get maximum SEO benefit from using and improve your site’s rankings, you will want to make sure to 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 posts, so your pages can go from this …

To something with an SEO-friendly URL like this …

In this step-by-step 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 out-of-the-box URL structure and help every new post you publish get better indexing in Google.

Configuring Your WordPress Permalinks

From your WP administration menu, 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 “pretty” permalinks instead for our posts. To do this, we need to specify a different Permalink structure than the one set by default.

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 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/travel-deals/how-to-save-money-on-cruise-travel

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=431

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

How To Add SEO-Friendly Tags In Custom Structure

“Pretty” URLs, or search engine-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. ‘2016’)
• %monthnum% – The month your post is published (e.g. ‘06’)
• %day% – The day the post is published (e.g. ‘15’)
• %hour% – The hour your post is published (e.g. ‘24’)
• %minute% – The minute the post is published (e.g. ‘42’)
• %second% – The exact second your post gets published (e.g. ‘53’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘4504’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of your post title. For example, if the 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 characters and exclamation marks deleted) in the URL. Tip: You can always edit the words in your post titles 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 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 the ‘Custom Structure’ setting.

Optional Permalink Settings

In this section, you can set custom structures for your category and tag URLs.

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

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

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

So, if you add the following to your permalinks Optional > Category base settings section …

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

To something like this …

If you leave the optional settings fields blank the defaults will be used.

Remember to save any changes when 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 – Additional Information

Use Descriptive Categories

To get the best possible 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 and author of the WordPress SEO plugin Joost de Valk, here are some points to keep in mind if you are wondering whether or not to add categories to your permalinks:

• If your category 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 share and reduce 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 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 cover WordPress categories in other articles.

Avoid Time-Stamping Permalinks

Another useful 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 web URLs, it’s best to avoid using date-based permalink settings when configuring your URLs.

(Avoid setting up permalinks that date your content)

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 Blog Has Lots Of Published Content?

Normally, it’s best to configure your site’s permalinks when you first install WordPress. This should be part of your site planning process.

If your website has been running for a while 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 something that needs doing, as changing permalinks after your site has already been up and running for a while could create issues and errors.

Use 301 Redirects

As you’ve seen in the above screenshots of actual search results, many WordPress site owners (or their web developers) are completely unaware of the SEO-friendly URLs feature of WordPress.

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

The best way to change your URL structure without negatively affecting your site’s SEO is to add ‘301 redirections’ to point links that use the old URL structure to web addresses using the new permalink structure.

A ’301′ code is interpreted by search engines as a link that has been permanently moved. 301 redirection is the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect visitors to new web page destinations and avoid page errors when following an old link.

To effectively change your permalink structure and avoid damaging your search rankings, sending visitors to broken links, etc. you should configure your redirection system before messing with the permalink structure of your site.

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

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

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

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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