Wouldn’t it be great if you could just add a new post to your WordPress website or blog, and the following would then take place … just from your web address:

• New visitors could tell what your content was about,
• Search engines would be able to easily discover your page and correctly classify its content to improve your search rankings,
• Each content item published on your website or blog would have its own unique ID, making your content easier to manage.

Well, this is what a permalink lets you do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – What Are They?

A permalink is the permanent URL to your individual posts, categories and other taxonomies (a way to organize things together) like archives.

A permalink is the web address that other people will use to link to posts or sections of your site or the links you send in an email pointing to a particular post on your blog. Some people also call permalinks “pretty” URLs.

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

Why Do You Need To Use Permalinks?

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

WordPress is not only great for SEO out of the box, but there are excellent SEO plugins you can use that can easily help to improve its SEO aspect.

If you focus on the SEO aspect of your site, then you cannot ignore the importance of your URLs. Google places considerable weight on the URL structure of your site.

Permalinks are 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 in WordPress.

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

The link structure shown above is used by WordPress to find data inside your database. It does not help your website with on-site SEO.

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

Although these sites are still getting their content indexed on search engines, they are missing out on extra SEO benefits.

To get the greatest SEO benefit out of using and improve your site’s rankings, you should 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 you the ability to create a custom URL structure for your published 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 configure the Permalinks section of your WordPress site 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 Google.

Configuring WordPress Permalinks

In your WordPress admin select, Settings > Permalinks …

This will bring 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 need to specify a different Permalink structure than the default.

Common Settings

In the Common Settings section, select Custom Structure, then add one or more ‘tags’ (see below) to create search engine-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/travel-tips/river-cruise-holiday-bargains

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=8936

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

Pretty 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 the post is published, four digits (e.g. ‘2018’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘09’)
• %day% – The day the post gets published (e.g. ‘11’)
• %hour% – The hour the post is published (e.g. ‘09’)
• %minute% – The minute your post is published (e.g. ‘35’)
• %second% – The exact second the post is published (e.g. ‘03’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘8003’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted version of your post title. For example, if your post title is “Top Five Budget Travel Tips!”, the postname tag will convert this into “top-five-budget-travel-tips” (all lower case characters and exclamation mark 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 sanitized 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’.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

In this section, you can enter custom structures for your tag and category pages.

You can change the ‘base’ category or tag of 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 make the following change in your permalinks Optional > Category base settings field …

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

To something like this …

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

Remember to save any changes after 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 Categories

To get the optimal 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 plugin developer Joost de Valk, here are a few things to keep in mind if you are wondering whether or not to add categories to your permalink structure:

• If your category slug is short and descriptive (e.g. adds a relevant keyword or keyword phrase to your URL), you may want to add categories 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 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 we recommend not using the category tag in your permalink structure.

Ultimately, when it comes to category vs no category there is no ideal permalink structure to use. Use the permalink structure that you think will suit your needs best. Many SEO experts and webmasters recommend making your web addresses short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We provide more information about WordPress categories in another tutorial.

Make Your Posts Timeless

Another great tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your site is a news site or there is a special reason why you need to create dated website URLs, avoid choosing date-based permalink settings when setting up your site’s URLs.

(Avoid using URL structures that time-stamp your content)

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

Changing Permalinks In Blog With Many Published Posts

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

If your website or blog 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 making changes to permalinks after your site has already been going for a while could create SEO issues and errors.

Use 301 Redirection

As you’ve seen in earlier screenshots, many site owners (or their web developers) are completely unaware of the permalinks feature of WordPress.

Maybe you started out using the default WordPress permalinks and now you want to improve your site’s SEO. Maybe your website or blog was originally set up to display post dates in your URLs and now all of your content is showing as being old and you want to delete the date tags of the permalinks.

To change your URL structure without negatively affecting your site’s SEO you should use ‘301 redirections’ to reassign links that use the previous URL syntax to URLs that use the new permalinks syntax.

A code ‘301’ is interpreted by search engines as a link that has permanently moved elsewhere. 301 redirects are the most efficient and search engine friendly way to redirect visitors to new website destinations and avoid ‘404’ (Page not found) errors when they click on an old link.

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

You can WordPress site or blog 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 any problems and troubleshoot any errors.

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

Congratulations! Now you know how to configure your blog to display search engine-friendly URLs for your posts and improve your search results. For additional information on using Permalinks, see the official WordPress documentation here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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