Wouldn’t it be great if after publishing content on your WordPress website or blog, the following took place … all from your URL:

• Site readers could easily glean what your post is about,
• Google could find your pages faster,
• Every single post created on your website would have its own unique identifier, making your content easier to manage.

Well, this is what a permalink lets you do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

What Is A Permalink?

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

A permalink is the URL that other people will use to link to articles or sections of your site or the links you send in emails pointing to content items on your website. Permalinks are often called “pretty” URLs.

Permalinks make the URL pointing to each post on your site permanent, hence a permalink.

Why Use Permalinks?

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

WordPress is not only well optimized right out of the box, but the SEO aspect can be further improved with SEO plugins.

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

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

Now … let’s review the reason why it’s best to configure your permalinks when publishing content in WordPress.

By default, a WordPress installation uses a non-search engine friendly URL structure for your posts that looks like this …

WordPress uses the link structure shown above to find information within your database. It doesn’t really help your website with on-site SEO.

As you can see from the image below taken directly from Google search results, many WordPress users are still using out of the box permalink settings when publishing their content …

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

To get the most SEO benefit from using WordPress and improve your site’s rankings, you will want to make sure to set up your permalinks structure to make it more SEO-friendly by displaying relevant keywords in your URL, instead of meaningless characters.

WordPress lets you create a custom URL structure for your published and archived posts, so your pages can go from this …

To something like this …

In this step-by-step tutorial, you will learn how to set up the Permalinks section of your WordPress site to display posts using search engine-friendly URLs instead of the default linking structure and help every new post you publish automatically get better indexing results in Google.

How To Change Your WordPress Permalinks

Log into your WordPress admin and select Settings > Permalinks …

This brings 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 “pretty” permalinks instead for our posts. To do this, we will need to specify a different Permalink structure than the default.

Common Settings – Permalinks

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 SEO-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/travel-europe/cruise-holiday-deals

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=3861

(Using permalinks helps search engines and readers understand what the content is about)

How To Use Permalink Tags

“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. ‘04’)
• %day% – The day your post is published (e.g. ‘28’)
• %hour% – The hour the post is published (e.g. ‘04’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘31’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘40’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘9006’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of your post title. For example, if the post title is ”It Ain’t Worth Doin’ No More!”, the postname tag will convert this into “it-aint-worth-doin-no-more” (all lower case characters and no exclamation marks) 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 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

If you need to set up custom permalinks for your category and tag pages you can do this in this section.

You can change the ‘base’ category or tag 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/category_name/’.

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

Your ‘category archives’ page URL will go from looking like 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 – Tips

Use Short, Descriptive Categories

To get the most 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 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 permalinks:

• If your domain is short and your category is short and descriptive (e.g. adds a relevant keyword or keyword phrase to your URL), you may want to use categories 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 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.

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

We provide more information about WordPress categories in other tutorials.

Make Your Posts Timeless

Another tip from Joost de Valk is that unless you run a news site or you have a special reason to date your site’s content, it’s best to avoid choosing date-based permalink settings for your blog’s URLs.

(Avoid setting up permalinks that time-stamp your content)

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

What If My Blog Already Has Published Posts?

Normally, it’s best to configure 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 really something that needs to be done, as making changes to permalinks after your site has already been up and running for a while can create issues and errors.

301 Redirection

As you’ve seen in the above screenshots of actual search results, some WordPress site owners (or whoever set up their site) seem to be completely unaware of the permalinks feature of WordPress.

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

The best way to modify your permalinks without impacting your site’s SEO or rankings in a negative way is to use ‘301 redirects’ to reassign links that use the old URL syntax to destinations that use the new permalink syntax.

A ’301′ code is interpreted by search engines as a link that has permanently moved to another destination. 301 redirection is the most efficient and search engine friendly way to redirect users to new website destinations and avoid running into ‘404’ (Page not found) errors if they click on an old link.

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

You can add a link redirection system to your do this 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 a 301 redirection system using 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, see the official WordPress documentation here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

***