Wouldn’t it be great if you could publish a new post on your WordPress website, and the following would then happen … just from your post URL:

• Visitors could understand what the post was about,
• Google would find your posts faster,
• Every single post published on your site would have its own unique identifier, making things easier to manage.

Well, with permalinks this can easily be done!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

What Are Permalinks?

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

A permalink is the URL that visitors and search engines will use to link to your articles or sections of your site or the links you send in emails pointing to your posts. Permalinks are often called “pretty” URLs.

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

Why Use Permalinks?

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

WordPress is not only well optimized right out of the box, but there are SEO plugins you can use that can help to finetune its SEO aspect further.

If you focus on the SEO aspect of your site, then you cannot ignore the importance of its URLs. Google tends to pay special attention to the structure of a site’s URLs when indexing its content.

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

Now … let’s turn our attention to why you may need to configure your permalinks in WordPress.

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

WordPress uses the above link with a string query to locate information within your database. It doesn’t really help your website with on-site SEO.

As the screenshot image below shows, many site owners have not yet set up their sites to use WordPress permalinks …

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

To get optimal SEO benefit out of 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 posts, so your pages can go from this …

To something like this …

Out of the box, WordPress post URLs are not very search engine-friendly. This step-by-step tutorial shows you how to set up your permalinks in WordPress to display posts using search engine-friendly URLs.

Setting Up Your WordPress Permalinks

Log into your WP admin 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 Permalink 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 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-tips/how-to-save-money-on-cruise-travel

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=407

(Using permalinks helps readers understand what your page is about)

Creating Pretty WordPress URLs

“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. ‘06’)
• %day% – The day the post gets published (e.g. ‘05’)
• %hour% – The hour the post gets published (e.g. ‘14’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘31’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘16’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘8215’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of the 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 letters and removed punctuation symbols) in the URL. Tip: You can edit the wording in your post title 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 adding the /%postname%/ tag in ‘Custom Structure’.

Optional Permalink Settings

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

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

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

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

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

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

To this …

If you leave the fields blank WordPress uses the default settings.

Remember to save your changes when you are 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 – Additional Info

Set Up Your Categories

To get the most SEO benefit out of 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 consider if you are wondering whether you should add categories to your permalinks or not:

• 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 decrease 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.

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

We cover WordPress categories in another tutorial.

Make Your Posts Timeless

Another useful tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your website provides news, or you have any special reason to create dated post URLs, avoid using date-based permalink syntax when setting up your URLs.

(Avoid setting up URL structures that time-stamp your content)

Visitors are less likely to click on a post that is several years old, even if the content is relevant to the answers they are searching for.

What If My Site Already Has Lots Of Content?

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

If your site is already established 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 absolutely something that needs doing, as doing so can create issues and loss of traffic.

301 Redirects

As you’ve seen in earlier screenshots, many WordPress users (or their web developers) seem to be unaware of the search-friendly URLs 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. Maybe your site 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 delete the date tags in the permalinks.

To edit your permalink structure without negatively impacting your site’s SEO you should use ‘301 redirections’ to point links set up using the previous permalinks structure to web addresses that use the new permalink syntax.

A code ‘301’ is interpreted by search engines as a link that has permanently moved. 301 redirection is the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect visitors to new website destinations and avoid running into ”page not found” errors when clicking on an old link.

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

You can WP site using redirection plugins 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 plugins or get professional help)

Congratulations! Now you know how to change your WordPress permalinks to display SEO-friendly URLs for your posts and improve your search search rankings. For additional information on using Permalinks, see the official WordPress documentation below:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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