Wouldn’t it be great if after adding content to your WordPress site, the following could happen … just from your post URL:

• New visitors could quickly understand what the post was about,
• Search engines could discover your posts faster,
• Every piece of content added to your website or blog would have its own unique ID, making things easier to manage.

Well, this is what permalinks let you do!

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 group things together) like archives.

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

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

Permalinks – Why Do We Need To Use Them?

As you are probably aware, WordPress is one of the best Content Management Systems available when it comes to publishing search engines optimized content.

WordPress is not only well optimized straight out of the box, but there are excellent SEO plugins you can install that will help to improve its SEO aspect further.

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 pay special attention to the structure of your site’s URLs when indexing its site pages.

Permalinks are used to turn links on your site into memorable and more “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 use permalinks in WordPress.

By default, a 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 with a string query to locate information inside your database. It does not mean much to anyone, and it doesn’t help your website with on-site search engine optimization.

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

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

To get the maximum 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 characters.

WordPress offers the ability to create a custom URL structure for your published and archived posts, so your content can go from this …

To something like this …

By default, WordPress post URLs are not very SEO-friendly. This tutorial explains how to configure your WordPress permalinks to automatically get better indexing results in search engines like Google.

Changing WordPress Permalinks

Log into your WP dashboard section and 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 “pretty” permalink instead for our posts. To do this, we will need to specify a different Permalink structure than the one set by default.

Permalinks - Common Settings

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-travel/how-to-save-money-on-cruise-travel

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=9975

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

How To Create Permalink Tags

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

• %year% – The year of the post, displayed as four digits (e.g. ‘2017’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘04’)
• %day% – The day the post gets published (e.g. ‘30’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘23’)
• %minute% – The minute the post gets published (e.g. ‘53’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘15’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘2976’)
• %postname% – A sanitized 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 exclamation marks removed) in the URL. Tip: You can always edit this 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 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 the ‘Custom Structure’ setting and adding the /%postname%/ tag.

Optional Permalink Settings

If you need to set up custom permalinks for your tag and category page URLs here is where you would do this.

This changes the ‘base’ tag or category for your 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 would make your category links display as ‘http://domain.com/travel/uncategorized/’.

So, if you add the following to your permalinks Optional > Category base settings field …

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

To something like this …

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

Remember to save your changes when 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 Short, Descriptive Categories

To get the optimal SEO benefit from using Permalinks, it’s important 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 Joost de Valk, here are some things to keep in mind if you are wondering whether you should add categories to your permalinks or not:

• If your category name 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 or copy and reduce the SEO benefit.
• If you are going to post content under multiple categories, then we recommend not using 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 web address short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We provide detailed information about WordPress categories in other tutorials.

Don’t Use Date Permalinks

Another great tip from Joost de Valk is that unless you run a news website or blog or you have a special reason to date your content, avoid choosing date-based permalink syntax when setting up your site’s URLs.

(Avoid using permalinks that date your posts)

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

What If My Site Already Has Lots Of Indexed Posts?

Normally, it’s best to configure your site’s permalinks when you install a new WordPress site. This should be part of your website planning process.

If your site is already established or your site already has a lot of content 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 making changes to permalinks after your site has already been running for a while could create SEO issues and errors.

301 Redirects

As you’ve seen earlier, many WordPress site owners (or whoever set up their site) seem to be completely unaware of the search-friendly URLs feature of WordPress.

Maybe you started out using the default WordPress permalinks and now you want to improve your site’s SEO. 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 out-of-date and you want to delete the date tags in the permalinks.

The best way to modify your URL structure without impacting your site’s SEO or existing rankings in a negative way is to use ‘301 redirections’ to point links using the old permalink structure to links using the new permalink structure.

A ’301′ code is interpreted by search engines as a link that has permanently moved to another location. 301 redirects are the most efficient 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 effectively change your permalink syntax and avoid SEO problems, sending visitors to broken links, etc. you should install and set up your redirection system before messing with the permalink structure of your site.

You can add a link redirection system to your site using a WordPress redirection plugin like Simple 301 Redirects, or Redirection, or get a professional to help you set up and redirect your permalinks correctly to avoid problems and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up link redirections using a WordPress plugin or get professional help)

Congratulations! Now you know how to set up your site to display SEO-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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