Wouldn’t it be great if after adding a new post to your site, the following happened … all from your page address:

• Potential site visitors could easily tell what the content was about,
• Search engines could find your posts faster,
• Each content item published on your site would have a unique identifier, making your site easier to manage.

Well, this is what WordPress permalinks let you do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – Definition

Permalinks are the permanent URLs to your individual posts, categories and other taxonomies (a way to organize things together) like archives.

A permalink is the web address that other people use to link to your posts or sections of your site or the links you send in an email pointing readers to posts on your site. Permalinks are often called “pretty” URLs.

Permalinks make the URLs to each post on your site permanent, hence a perma-link.

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 great for SEO out of the box, but there are SEO plugins you can use that can help to improve its SEO aspect considerably.

If you focus on the SEO aspect of your site, then you cannot ignore the importance of its site’s URLs. Search engines like Google tend to give special consideration to the structure of URLs when indexing its 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 in WordPress.

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

WordPress uses the above link with a string query to find information within your database. It doesn’t really mean anything to visitors or search engines, and it doesn’t help your site with on-site search engine optimization.

As you can see from the screenshot below taken from Google search listings, many WordPress site owners haven’t set up their sites to use WordPress permalinks …

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

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

WordPress lets you create a custom URL structure for your published and archived posts, so your content can easily go from this …

To this …

Out of the box, WordPress post URLs are not very SEO-friendly. This tutorial explains how to configure the Permalinks section of your WordPress site to get better indexing in search engines like Google.

How To Set Up WordPress Permalinks

In your WordPress admin 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 will need to specify a different Permalink structure than the one set by default.

Common Permalink Settings

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

(Change 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/cruise-holiday-deals

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=8936

(Using permalinks helps readers understand what the content is about)

Permalink Tags

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

• %year% – The year the post gets published, four digits (e.g. ‘2018’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘01’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘25’)
• %hour% – The hour your post gets published (e.g. ‘11’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘46’)
• %second% – The exact second the post is published (e.g. ‘37’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘6643’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of the 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 removed) in the URL. Tip: You can 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 choosing ‘Custom Structure’ and adding the /%postname%/ tag.

Optional Permalink Settings

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

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, changing your category base to “travel” will 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 change from this …

To this …

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

Remember to save your 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 – Tips

Use Short, Descriptive Categories

To get the optimal 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 plugin developer Joost de Valk, here are a few things to keep in mind if you are wondering whether or not to add categories to your permalink structure:

• If your category slug is short and descriptive (e.g. uses a relevant keyword or keyword phrase), 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.
• 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.

Despite being the subject of intense debate in WordPress SEO circles, when it comes to category vs no category there is no ideal permalink structure to use. Use the permalink structure you think will suit your site best. Your post URLs should be short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We provide detailed information about WordPress categories in other articles.

Create Timeless Posts

Another useful tip from Joost de Valk is that unless you run a news website or there is a special reason why you need to add dates to your post URLs, avoid selecting date-based permalink syntax when setting up your site’s URLs.

(Avoid using permalinks that date your posts)

Although setting up URL structures that date your posts may be considered better that using no permalinks at all from an SEO point-of-view, people are less likely to click on a post if it is several years old, even if the content is relevant to what they are searching for.

Changing Permalinks In Blog With Indexed Content

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 is already established 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 something that absolutely needs doing, as making changes to permalinks after your site has been up and running for a while could create SEO issues and loss of traffic.

301 Redirects

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

Maybe when you started out, your site used the default WordPress URL structure and now you would like to optimize your site better for search engines. Maybe your website or blog was configured to display post dates in your web address and now all of your content is showing as being old and you want to delete the date portion in the permalinks.

To change your permalink structure without affecting your site’s SEO or existing rankings in a negative way you should add ‘301 redirections’ to point links set up using the previous URL structure to page URLs that use the new structure.

Search engines interpret a code ‘301’ as a link that has 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 running into page errors when following an old link.

To create an effective permalink structure change and avoid damaging your search rankings, sending visitors to error pages, etc. you should configure your redirection system before messing with the permalink structure of your site.

You can add a link redirection system to your site using WP redirection plugins 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 any problems and troubleshoot any errors.

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

Congratulations! Now you know how to set up your WordPress site or blog’s permalinks to display SEO-friendly URLs for your posts. For additional information on using Permalinks, refer to the WordPress codex below:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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