Wouldn’t it be great if after publishing content on your WordPress website, the following could take place … just from your page URL:

• Readers could easily glean what the content was about,
• Search engines would be able to discover your pages faster,
• Every post created on your site would have a unique identifier, making things easier to manage.

Well, this is what a WordPress permalink lets you do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – Definition

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

A permalink is the URL that others will use to link to your articles or sections of your site or the links you send in emails pointing readers to a specific item of content on your site. Permalinks are often called “pretty” URLs.

Permalinks make the URLs to each post on your blog permanent, hence a permalink.

Why Do You Need To Use Permalinks?

Hopefully, you probably know 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 its SEO aspect can be considerably finetuned using SEO plugins.

If you are looking to optimize the SEO aspect of your website, then you should not ignore the importance of your site’s URLs. Google tends to pay special attention to the structure of your site’s URLs when indexing its pages.

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

Now … let’s turn our attention to the reason why it’s best to configure your permalinks if publishing content 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 to locate data inside its database. It does not help your website with on-site SEO.

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

Although Google is clearly still indexing the above sites, they are potentially missing out on extra SEO benefits.

To get more SEO benefit from using WordPress 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 characters.

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

To something like this …

By default, WordPress URLs are not very SEO-friendly. This step-by-step tutorial shows you how to configure the Permalinks section of your WordPress site to display posts with search engine-friendly URLs.

Changing WordPress Permalinks

Log into your WordPress dashboard and click on 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 search engine friendly URLs instead for our posts. To do this, we will need to specify a different Permalink structure than the default one.

Common Settings – Permalinks

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

(Set up 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/best-value-european-river-cruise-destinations

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=5783

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

How To Create Pretty WordPress URLs

“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, displayed as four digits (e.g. ‘2018’)
• %monthnum% – The month the post gets published (e.g. ‘03’)
• %day% – The day the post is published (e.g. ‘19’)
• %hour% – The hour your post is published (e.g. ‘11’)
• %minute% – The minute your post gets published (e.g. ‘20’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘25’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘1945’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted version of your post title. For example, if the 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 lower case letters and punctuation marks removed) in the URL. Tip: You can always edit the words in your post title 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 adding the /%postname%/ tag in the ‘Custom Structure’ setting.

Optional Permalink Settings

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

You can change the ‘base’ tag or category for your URLs using the following syntax:

• 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 section …

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

To something like 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 – Tips

Use Short, Descriptive Categories

To get the best SEO benefit out of 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 a few points to consider if you are wondering whether or not to add categories to your permalink structure:

• If your category name 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 or copy 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 we recommend not using the category tag in your permalink structure.

Ultimately, when it comes to adding category vs no category there is no ideal permalink structure to use. We recommend choosing the permalink structure you think will suit your site 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 tutorial.

Avoid Date-Based Permalink Syntax

Another tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your goal is to run a news blog or you have any special reason to create dated post addresses, avoid choosing date-based permalink options when setting up your URLs.

(Avoid using URL structures that time-stamp 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 Blog Already Has Indexed Posts?

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

If your website is already established or your site already has many posts indexed in the search engines and you want to change the permalink structure, make sure that this is absolutely something that needs doing, as doing so could create issues and errors.

301 Redirection

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

Maybe you started out using the default WordPress URL structure and now you want to optimize your site better for search engines. Perhaps your website or blog was originally set up to display post dates in your URLs and now all of your content is perceived as being outdated and you want to delete the date tags of your URLs.

To edit your permalink structure without impacting your site’s SEO or existing rankings in a negative way you will need to use ‘301 redirects’ to reassign links that use the old permalinks syntax to web URLs using the new syntax.

Search engines interpret a code ‘301’ as a link that has permanently been moved to another location. 301 redirection is the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect users to new site destinations and avoid page errors if they click on an old link.

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

You can WordPress site using 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 issues and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up URL redirections using a WordPress plugin or use the services of a professional)

Congratulations! Now you know how to change your blog’s permalinks 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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