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

• New visitors could determine what your page was about,
• Google would be able to find your posts faster,
• Each post published on your website or blog would have a unique identifier, making your site easier to manage.

Well, this is what a permalink lets you do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – What Are They?

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

A permalink is the URL that people and search engines use to link to your posts or sections of your site or the links you send in emails pointing to your posts. Some people refer to permalinks as “pretty” URLs.

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

Why Do You Need To Use Permalinks?

Hopefully, you are probably aware that, WordPress is one of the best CMS applications you can use when it comes to SEO.

WordPress is not only great for SEO out of the box, but there are SEO plugins you can install that can easily help to fine tuned its SEO aspect.

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

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

Now … let’s take a look at the reason why you may need to configure your permalinks in WordPress.

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

WordPress uses the link with a string query shown above to locate data within its database. It doesn’t really mean much to anyone, and it doesn’t help your site with on-site search engine optimization.

As the screenshot image below shows, many WordPress site owners have not yet set up their sites to publish search optimized content …

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

To get the greatest SEO benefit out of using and improve your site’s traffic results, you should set up your permalinks structure to make it more search engine-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 something that is non-SEO friendly like this …

To something with an SEO-friendly URL like this …

In this step-by-step tutorial, you will learn how to configure your WordPress permalinks to display posts with SEO-friendly URLs instead of the out-of-the-box linking structure and help every new post you publish automatically get better indexing in search engines.

Setting Up Your WordPress Permalinks

From your WordPress dashboard menu, select 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 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 Settings – Permalinks

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/budget-cruises/top-5-european-river-cruise-destinations

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=4024

(Using permalinks helps readers and search engines understand what your post is about)

How To Create Permalink Tags In WordPress

“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, four digits (e.g. ‘2018’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘07’)
• %day% – The day your post is published (e.g. ‘06’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘04’)
• %minute% – The minute your post gets published (e.g. ‘02’)
• %second% – The exact second your post is published (e.g. ‘24’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘4958’)
• %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 letters converted to lower case and removed punctuation symbols) in the URL. Tip: You can always edit the wording in your post titles in the post slug field on the Add/Edit Post/Page screens.
• %category% – A sanitized 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.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

This section lets you configure custom structures for your category and tag pages.

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, using “travel” as your category base will display your category links as ‘http://domain.com/travel/category_name/’.

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

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

To this …

If you leave these fields blank WordPress uses the default settings.

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 Information

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, 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 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 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 copy or share and reduce the SEO benefit.
• 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 category vs no category there is no perfect permalink structure to use. We recommend choosing the permalink structure you think will suit your site best and that will make your site’s web addresses short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We cover WordPress categories in another tutorial.

Avoid Setting Up URL Structures That Time-Stamp Your Posts

Another tip from Joost de Valk is that unless you plan to run a news website or you have any special reason to add dates to your post URLs, it’s best to avoid choosing date-based permalink settings when setting up your site’s URLs.

(Avoid setting up URL structures that date your content)

People are less likely to click on a post that is several years old, even if the content is relevant to the answers they are searching for.

What If My Site Has Content?

Normally, your site’s permalinks should be configured when you perform a new WordPress installation. 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 would like 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 can create issues and errors.

Add 301 Redirects

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

Maybe you started out using the default WordPress URL structure and now you would like to optimize your site better for search engines. Perhaps your site was originally set up 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 of your URLs.

To change your URL structure without negatively impacting your site’s SEO or rankings you will need to add ‘301 redirects’ to point all links set up using the old permalink structure to web URLs using the new structure.

A code ‘301’ is interpreted by search engines as a link that has permanently moved. 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 if they click on an old link.

To effectively change your permalink syntax and avoid damaging your rankings, sending visitors to broken links, etc. you will need to add your redirection system before changing the permalink structure of your site.

You can site or blog using a redirection plugin 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 301 redirections using redirection plugins or use the services of a professional)

Congratulations! Now you know about the built-in system WordPress uses to display SEO-friendly URLs for your posts. To learn more about using Permalinks, refer to the official WordPress documentation below:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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