Wouldn’t it be great if you could just add a new page to your website or blog, and the following would then happen … all from your URL:

• Site readers could easily gain an understanding of what the page is about,
• Google would easily find your page and correctly index its content to improve your search rankings,
• Every item of content added to your site would have a unique identifier, making things easier to manage.

Well, with permalinks this is really easy to do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

What Is A Permalink?

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

A permalink is the web address that visitors and search engines will use to link to your posts or sections of your site or the links you send in emails pointing readers to content items on your blog. Some people also call permalinks “pretty” URLs.

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

Why Use Permalinks?

As you have probably heard by now, WordPress is one of the best CMS applications available when it comes to publishing search optimized content.

WordPress is not only well optimized right out of the box, but there are SEO plugins you can install that will help to fine tuned its SEO aspect considerably.

If you are looking to optimize the SEO aspect of your site, then you cannot ignore the importance of your URLs. Search engines like Google place considerable weight on the structure of URLs when indexing its content.

Permalinks can be used to make the 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 review the reason why it’s best to configure your permalinks in WordPress.

Typically, a default WordPress installation uses a non-search engine friendly URL-naming structure for your posts that looks like this …

The above link structure is used by WordPress to locate information inside its database. It doesn’t really help your site with on-site SEO.

As you can see from the screenshot image below, many WordPress site owners haven’t configured their permalinks …

Although these sites are getting their content indexed on search engines, the owners of these sites are potentially missing out on extra SEO benefits.

To get the best SEO benefit from using and improve your site’s traffic results, you will want to make sure to set up your permalinks structure to make it more search engine-friendly by displaying relevant keywords in your URL, instead of meaningless characters.

WordPress offers you the ability to create a custom URL structure for your published and archived posts, so your pages 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 step-by-step tutorial, you will learn how to set up your WP permalinks to display posts with SEO-friendly URLs.

Configuring Your WordPress Permalinks

In your WordPress admin 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 search engine friendly URLs instead for our posts. To do this, we need to specify a different Permalink structure than the one set by default.

Common Settings – Permalinks

In the Common Settings section, select Custom Structure, then add one or more ‘tags’ (see below) to create search engine-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/budget-travel/romantic-cruise-holiday-deals

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=474

(Using permalinks helps visitors and search engines understand what your content is about)

Creating Permalink Tags

“Pretty” permalinks, or SEO-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. ‘2018’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘06’)
• %day% – The day the post gets published (e.g. ‘06’)
• %hour% – The hour your post gets published (e.g. ‘17’)
• %minute% – The minute your post is published (e.g. ‘43’)
• %second% – The exact second your post gets published (e.g. ‘18’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘8621’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted version of the 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 punctuation marks removed) in the URL. Tip: You can always edit the wording 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’ option and adding the /%postname%/ tag.

Optional Permalink Settings

If you need to configure custom permalinks for your tag and category archive pages here is where you would do this.

This changes the ‘base’ tag or category URLs using the following structure:

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

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

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

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

To something like this …

If you leave the fields blank the default settings will be used.

Remember to save any 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 – Additional Info

Categories

To get maximum 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 expert and author of the WordPress SEO plugin Joost de Valk, here are some things to consider if you are wondering whether you should add categories to your permalinks or not:

• If your domain is short and 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 are going 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. Choose a permalink structure you think will suit your site best. Many SEO experts and webmasters recommend making your web address short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We provide detailed information about WordPress categories in another tutorial.

Don’t Use Date Permalinks

Another great tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your site is a news blog or there is a special reason why you need to date your content, it’s best to avoid using date-based permalink settings when setting up your site’s URLs.

(Avoid using permalinks that date your posts)

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

What About Established Blogs?

Normally, it’s best to configure your permalinks when you first install WordPress. This should be part of your website 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 would like to change the permalink structure, make sure that this is really something that needs doing, as making changes to permalinks after your site has already been running for a while could create SEO issues and errors.

301 Redirection

As you’ve seen in the above screenshots of actual search results, some WordPress users (or their web developers) seem to be unaware of the permalinks feature of WordPress.

Maybe when you started, 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 showing as being old and you want to remove the date tags of the URLs.

To modify your permalinks without negatively impacting your site’s SEO you will need to use ‘301 redirects’ to point links set up using the previous permalinks syntax to page URLs using the new syntax.

A code ‘301’ is interpreted by search engines as a link that has permanently moved. 301 redirects are the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect users to new site destinations and avoid ”page not found” errors when following an old link.

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

You can add a link redirection system to your site using 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 301 redirects using 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 and improve your search results. To learn more about using Permalinks, refer to the official WordPress documentation below:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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