Wouldn’t it be great if after publishing a new page on your WordPress website or blog, the following happened … just from your post URL:

• Potential visitors to your site could easily understand what the content was about,
• Google could discover your posts faster,
• Every single post added to your website would have its own unique ID, making your site easier to manage.

Well, this is what permalinks let you do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

What’s A Permalink?

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

A permalink is the URL that other people will use to link to articles or sections of your site or the links you send in emails pointing to articles on your site. Permalinks are often referred to as “pretty” URLs.

Permalinks make the web address pointing 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 available when it comes to SEO.

WordPress is not only well optimized right out of the box, but the SEO aspect can be easily enhanced with SEO plugins.

If you are looking to optimize the SEO aspect of your website, then you cannot ignore the importance of its URLs. Google places considerable weight on the URL structure of your site.

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

Now … let’s review why it’s best to use permalinks when publishing content in WordPress.

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

The link structure shown above is used by WordPress to locate information within its database. It doesn’t really mean much to anyone, and it doesn’t help your site with on-site SEO.

As you can see from the image below, many site owners haven’t yet set up their permalinks …

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

To get the maximum SEO benefit from using WordPress and improve your site’s rankings, you should configure your permalinks structure to make it more search engine-friendly by displaying relevant keywords in your URL, instead of meaningless characters.

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

To something with an SEO-friendly URL like this …

By default, WordPress post URLs are not very search engine-friendly. This tutorial explains how to set up your WordPress permalinks to display your posts using search engine-friendly URLs.

Changing WordPress Permalinks

Log into your WordPress administration section 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 search engine friendly URL 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 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-tips/top-3-european-river-cruises

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=625

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

Adding Pretty URL Tags In Custom Structure

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

• %year% – The year the post is published, four digits (e.g. ‘2012’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘09’)
• %day% – The day the post is published (e.g. ‘21’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘20’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘18’)
• %second% – The exact second your post gets published (e.g. ‘06’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘4071’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted 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 characters converted to lower case and exclamation marks removed) 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’ option.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

Here you can configure custom structures for your tag and category archive pages.

This changes the ‘base’ category or tag 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 “topics” 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 looking like this …

To this …

If you leave these fields blank the defaults will be used.

Remember to save your 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 – Additional Info

Use Descriptive Categories

To get the best SEO 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 and author of the WordPress SEO plugin Joost de Valk, here are some points 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 is short and descriptive (e.g. uses a relevant keyword or keyword phrase), you may want to add categories to 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 or copy 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 we recommend not using the category tag in your permalink structure.

Ultimately, 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 site best and that will make your post URLs short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We cover WordPress categories in another tutorial.

Create Timeless Posts

Another useful tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your goal is to run a news website or blog or you have any special reason to create dated post URLs, it’s best to avoid selecting date-based permalink settings when configuring your blog’s URLs.

(Avoid setting up permalinks that time-stamp your posts)

Although using URL structures that time-stamp your posts may be considered better that using no permalinks at all from an SEO point-of-view, visitors are less likely to click on posts that are a couple of years old, even if the content is relevant to the answers they are searching for.

What About Sites With Published Posts?

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

If your website 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 something that absolutely needs doing, as doing so can create SEO issues and loss of traffic.

301 Redirection

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

Maybe you started out using the default WordPress permalinks and now you would like to improve your SEO. Perhaps your website 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 delete the date tags in your URLs.

To modify your permalink structure without affecting your site’s SEO in a negative way you should use ‘301 redirections’ to point links set up using the old URL syntax to web URLs using the new permalink structure.

A code ‘301’ is interpreted by search engines as a link that has permanently moved elsewhere. 301 redirection is the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect users to new site destinations and avoid ‘404’ (Page not found) errors when following an old link.

To create an effective syntax change and avoid damaging your search rankings, sending visitors to broken links, etc. you should configure a redirection system before changing the permalink structure of your site.

You can add a link redirection system to your do this using WP plugins like Simple 301 Redirects, or Redirection, or use the services of a professional to help you set up and redirect your permalinks correctly to avoid issues and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up link redirections using a WP redirection plugin or use the services of a professional)

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

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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