Wouldn’t it be great if you could simply add a new post to your website or blog, and the following happened … just from your post URL:

• Potential visitors to your site could quickly glean what your page was about,
• Google would find your posts faster,
• Each post published on your website or blog would have a unique ID, making things easier to manage.

Well, this is what permalinks let you do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – What Are They?

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

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

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

Permalinks – Why Do I Need To Use Them?

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

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

If you are looking to optimize the SEO aspect of your website, then you should not ignore the importance of its URLs. Search engines like Google tend to give special significance to the structure of URLs when indexing pages.

Permalinks are used to turn 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 you should use permalinks when publishing content in WordPress.

Typically, a default WordPress installation uses a link-naming structure for your posts that isn’t search engine friendly and looks like this …

WordPress uses the above link structure to locate information within its database. It does not mean anything to either visitors or search engines, and it doesn’t help your site with on-site SEO.

As the screenshot image from Google search results below shows, many WordPress users haven’t yet configured their sites to use WordPress permalinks …

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

To get maximum SEO benefit out of 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 numbers and symbols.

WordPress lets you create a custom URL structure for your published and archived posts, so your content can go from something that is non-SEO friendly like this …

To this …

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

How To Change WordPress Permalinks

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

Permalinks - Common Settings

In the Common Settings section, select Custom Structure, then add one or more ‘tags’ (see below) to create SEO-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/seven-top-european-river-cruise-destinations

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=2161

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

Adding Search Engine-Friendly Tags In Custom Structure

“Pretty” URLs, 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. ‘05’)
• %day% – The day your post gets published (e.g. ‘05’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘05’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘39’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘17’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘8614’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted version of the post title. For example, if your post title is ”The Five Don’ts Of DIY Home Repair!”, the postname tag will convert this into “the-five-donts-of-diy-home-repair” (all letters converted to lower case and punctuation marks deleted) in the URL. Tip: You can always edit this wording 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 correctly formatted 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 adding the /%postname%/ tag.

Optional Permalink Settings

This section lets you set up custom structures for your category and tag archive page URLs.

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

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

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

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

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

To this …

If you leave these fields blank WordPress uses the defaults.

Remember to save any changes when 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

Categories

To get the best SEO 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 points to keep in mind if you are wondering whether or not to add categories to your permalink structure:

• If your category is short and descriptive (e.g. adds a relevant keyword or keyword phrase to your URL), you may want to add the category tag 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 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 using category vs no category there really is no ideal permalink structure to use. We recommend choosing the permalink structure you think will suit your needs best and that will make your post URLs short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We provide detailed information about WordPress categories in another article.

Avoid Time-Stamping Permalinks

Another tip from Joost de Valk is that unless you plan to run a news site or you have any special reason to create dated post addresses, avoid using date-based permalink syntax for your blog’s URLs.

(Avoid using permalinks that time-stamp your content)

Although using permalinks that date your content may be considered better that using no permalinks at all from an SEO point-of-view, visitors 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.

What About Changing Permalinks In Blogs With Indexed Posts?

Normally, it’s best to set up your site’s permalinks when you first install WordPress. This should be part of your website planning process.

If your website or blog 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 something that absolutely needs doing, as doing so can create issues and errors.

Add 301 Redirects

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

Maybe when you started, your site used the default WordPress permalinks and now you would like to improve your SEO. Perhaps your site was configured to display post dates in your URLs and now all of your content is perceived as being out-of-date and you want to remove the date portion of the URLs.

To change your URL structure without negatively affecting your site’s SEO or rankings you will need to use ‘301 redirections’ to point all links that use the old permalinks structure to URLs using the new permalink structure.

Search engines interpret a code ‘301’ as a link that has been permanently relocated. 301 redirects are the most efficient and search engine friendly way to redirect visitors to new website destinations and avoid running into ”page not found” errors when following an old link.

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

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

(Set up 301 redirects using a WP redirection plugin or get professional assistance)

Congratulations! Now you know how to change your blog’s permalinks to display search engine-friendly URLs for your posts. To learn more about using Permalinks, see the WordPress codex below:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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