Wouldn’t it be great if you could just publish a new post on your website or blog, and the following would then take place … just from your page address:

• Site readers could quickly understand what your page is about,
• Search engines would easily find your page and correctly classify its content to improve your search rankings,
• Every single item of content you create on your website would have a unique ID, making your content easier to manage.

Well, with permalinks this can easily be done!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – Definition

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

A permalink is the URL that other people will use to link to posts or sections of your site or the links you send in emails pointing readers to articles on your site. Some people also call permalinks “pretty” URLs.

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

Why Do You Need To Use Permalinks?

Hopefully, you are probably aware by now that, WordPress is one of the best Content Management Systems you can use when it comes to SEO.

WordPress is not only well optimized straight out of the box, but the SEO aspect can be further fine tuned with SEO plugins.

If you focus on the SEO aspect of your website, then you should not ignore the importance of its site’s URLs. Search engines like Google place considerable weight on the structure of a site’s URLs when indexing site pages.

Permalinks are used to make the links on your site into “prettier” and more “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 it’s best to use permalinks when publishing content in WordPress.

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

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

As the screenshot below shows, many site owners have not configured their permalinks …

Although these sites are getting their content indexed on search engines, many site owners are potentially missing out on additional SEO benefits.

To get optimal SEO benefit out of using and improve your site’s rankings, you will want to make sure to configure 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 and archived posts, so your content can easily go from this …

To something like this …

Out of the box, WordPress URLs are not very search engine-friendly. In this step-by-step tutorial, you will learn how to set up your permalinks in WordPress to automatically get better indexing results in search engines like Google.

Configuring WordPress Permalinks

In your WordPress administration menu, click on 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.

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 …

(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/europe-travel/7-best-european-cruise-destinations

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=8150

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

Pretty URL Tags

“Pretty” URLs, 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, displayed as four digits (e.g. ‘2017’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘04’)
• %day% – The day the post gets published (e.g. ‘18’)
• %hour% – The hour the post is published (e.g. ‘18’)
• %minute% – The minute the post is published (e.g. ‘58’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘56’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘6750’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted version of your post title. For example, if your post title is “Top Five Budget Travel Tips!”, the postname tag will convert this into “top-five-budget-travel-tips” (all lower case characters and no exclamation mark) 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 selecting ‘Custom Structure’ and using the /%postname%/ tag.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

If you need to set up custom permalinks for your tag and category archive page URLs you can do this in this section.

You can change 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, using “travel” as your category base would display your category links as ‘http://domain.com/travel/uncategorized/’.

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

Your ‘category archives’ page URL will go from looking like 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 – Additional Notes

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 Joost de Valk, here are a few things to consider if you are wondering whether you should add categories to your permalinks or not:

• If 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 share and decrease the SEO benefit.
• If you plan to post content under multiple categories, then we recommend not using 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 ”better” permalink structure to use. Use a permalink structure that you think will suit your site best. Many SEO experts and webmasters recommend making your web addresses short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We provide detailed information about WordPress categories in another article.

Make Your Content Timeless

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

(Avoid using permalinks that time-stamp your content)

Although using URL structures that time-stamp your content may be considered better that using no permalinks at all from an SEO aspect, people 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.

Changing Your Permalink Structure In Site With Indexed Content

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

If your site has been running for a while 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 really necessary, as doing so could create SEO issues and errors.

Add 301 Redirection

As you’ve seen in earlier screenshots, some WordPress users (or whoever set up their site) are unaware of the permalinks feature of WordPress.

Maybe you started out using the default WordPress permalinks and now you want to optimize your site better for search engines. Maybe your website was originally set up to display post dates in your web address and now all of your posts are perceived as being out-of-date and you want to remove the date tags of your URLs.

To change your permalink structure without negatively impacting your site’s SEO you will need to add ‘301 redirects’ to reassign all links that use the old permalink syntax to links using the new permalink structure.

Search engines interpret a ’301′ code as a link that has been permanently relocated to another destination. 301 redirection is the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect users to new web page destinations and avoid page errors when they click on an old link.

To create an effective permalink syntax change and avoid SEO problems, sending visitors to broken links, etc. you should set up a redirection system before messing with the permalink structure of your site.

You can WordPress site or blog using redirection plugins like Simple 301 Redirects, or Redirection, or get a professional to assist you with setting up and redirecting your permalinks correctly to avoid problems and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up 301 redirects using plugins or get professional assistance)

Congratulations! Now you know how to configure your blog 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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