Wouldn’t it be great if you could add a new post to your WordPress site, and the following happened … all from your web address:

• Potential site visitors could glean what the content was about,
• Google would easily find your page and correctly index your content to improve your search results,
• Every content item on your site would have a unique identifier, making your content easier to manage.

Well, with permalinks this can easily be done!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – What Are They?

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

A permalink is the URL that others will use to link to articles or sections of your site or the links you send in an email pointing readers to content items 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 perma-link.

Why Use Permalinks?

Hopefully, by now you probably know that, 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 excellent SEO plugins you can use that will help to finetune its SEO aspect considerably.

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

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

Now … let’s review the reason why you should configure your permalinks in WordPress.

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

The link structure shown above is used by WordPress to find data inside its database. It doesn’t really help your website with on-site search engine optimization.

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

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

To get the maximum SEO benefit from using and improve your site’s rankings, you should set up 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 something that is non-SEO friendly like this …

To something with an SEO-friendly URL like this …

In this tutorial, you will learn how to configure your WordPress permalinks to display your posts using SEO-friendly URLs instead of the default linking structure and help every new post you publish on your site get better indexing results in search engines.

Setting Up Your WordPress Permalinks

In your WordPress admin select, Settings > Permalinks …

This will bring 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 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 – 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/budget-cruises/romantic-cruise-holiday-deals

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=9006

(Using permalinks helps visitors and search engines understand what your page 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, displayed as four digits (e.g. ‘2018’)
• %monthnum% – The month the post gets published (e.g. ‘04’)
• %day% – The day your post is published (e.g. ‘02’)
• %hour% – The hour your post is published (e.g. ‘01’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘31’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘05’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘8143’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of the post title. For example, if your 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 letters and no punctuation symbols) in the URL. Tip: You can edit the words 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 selecting the ‘Custom Structure’ setting and using the /%postname%/ tag.

Optional Permalink Settings

If you need to configure custom structures for your tag and category pages you can do this in this section.

This changes the ‘base’ tag or category of your URLs using the following syntax:

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

For example, using “topics” as your category base would make your category links display 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 the optional settings fields blank WordPress uses the defaults.

Remember to save your 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 Info

Use Descriptive Categories

To get more 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 plugin developer Joost de Valk, here are some points to keep in mind if you are wondering whether you should add categories to your permalinks or not:

• If your domain is short and 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 copy and decrease 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.

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

We provide detailed information about WordPress categories in other articles.

Don’t Use Date Permalinks

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

(Avoid using permalinks that date your posts)

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

What About Changing Permalinks In An Established Site?

Normally, your 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 your site already has a lot of content indexed in the search engines and you want to change the permalink structure, make sure that this is really necessary, as making changes to permalinks after your site has already been up and running for a while can create SEO issues and errors.

301 Redirection

As you’ve seen in earlier screenshots, many website owners (or their web developers) seem to be completely unaware of the SEO-friendly URLs feature of WordPress.

Maybe when you started out, your site used the default WordPress permalinks and now you want to improve your SEO. Maybe your website or blog was originally set up to display post dates in your URLs and now all of your posts are perceived as being outdated and you want to remove the date portion of your permalinks.

The best way to edit your permalink structure without affecting your site’s SEO in a negative way is to use ‘301 redirects’ to reassign links that use the old URL structure to links that use the new syntax.

A ’301′ code is interpreted by search engines as a link that has been permanently relocated. 301 redirects are the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect visitors to new web page destinations and avoid running into page errors when following an old link.

To create an effective syntax change and avoid SEO problems, sending visitors to error pages, etc. you will need to add a redirection system before changing the permalink structure of your site.

You can site using a WordPress 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 any problems and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up a 301 redirection system using redirection plugins or get professional help)

Congratulations! Now you know about the built-in system WordPress uses to display search engine-friendly URLs for your posts. To learn more about using Permalinks, refer to the WordPress codex here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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