Wouldn’t it be great if after publishing a new post on your WordPress website or blog, the following happened … all from your URL:

• Potential site visitors could understand what your content is about,
• Google would find your posts faster,
• Every single content item on your site would have its own unique identifier, making your content easier to manage.

Well, with WordPress permalinks you can!

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 people and search engines use to link to your articles or sections of your site or the links you send in emails pointing to your posts. Some people also refer to permalinks as “pretty” URLs.

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

Permalinks – Why Use Them?

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

WordPress is not only great for SEO out of the box, but the SEO aspect can be considerably finetuned with SEO plugins.

If you are looking to optimize the SEO aspect of your website, then you should not ignore the importance of its site’s URLs. Search engines like Google tend to give special significance to the structure of URLs when indexing its site pages.

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

Now … let’s review why you should configure your permalinks in WordPress.

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

WordPress uses the link structure shown above to locate data within its database. It does not help your website with on-site SEO.

As you can see from the screenshot below, many WordPress site owners have not yet set up their permalinks …

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

To get optimal SEO benefit from using WordPress and improve your site’s traffic results, you will want to make sure to configure your permalinks structure to make it more search engine-friendly by displaying relevant keywords in your URL, instead of meaningless numbers and symbols.

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

To something like this …

By default, WordPress URLs are not very search engine-friendly. In this step-by-step tutorial, you will learn how to set up your permalinks in WordPress to help your content rank better in search engines.

Setting Up Your WordPress Permalinks

From your WP main menu, click on 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 search engine friendly URLs instead for our posts. To do this, we 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/travel-europe/romantic-european-river-cruises

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=4082

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

Permalink Tags

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

• %year% – The year of the post, four digits (e.g. ‘2018’)
• %monthnum% – The month the post gets published (e.g. ‘08’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘04’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘05’)
• %minute% – The minute your post is published (e.g. ‘22’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘11’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘19’)
• %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 characters 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 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 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 the ‘Custom Structure’ setting.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

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

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

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

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

So, if you make the following change in your permalinks Optional > Category base settings field …

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

To this …

If you leave these fields blank WordPress uses the defaults.

Remember to save your 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 – Tips

Set Up Your Categories

To get more SEO benefit from using Permalinks, you will need 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 things to keep in mind if you are wondering whether you should add categories to your permalink structure or not:

• 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 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 decrease the SEO benefit.
• If you plan 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 category vs no category there really is no ”better” permalink structure to use. Choose a permalink structure that you think will suit your site best. Your web addresses should be short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We provide more information about WordPress categories in another tutorial.

Create Timeless Posts

Another great tip from Joost de Valk is that unless you plan to run a news site or you have any special reason to add dates to your URLs, it’s best to avoid using date-based permalink settings when setting up your URLs.

(Avoid using permalinks that time-stamp your content)

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

What About Changing Permalinks In Blogs With Indexed Content?

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

If your website is already established or your site already has many posts indexed in the search engines and you would like to change the permalink structure, make sure that this is something that absolutely needs doing, as changing permalinks after your site has already been up and running for a while can create SEO issues and loss of traffic.

301 Redirects

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

Maybe when you started out, your site used the default WordPress permalinks and now you want to improve your site’s SEO. Maybe your site was originally set up to display post dates in your URLs and now all of your posts are showing as being two or three years old and you want to delete the date tags in your URLs.

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

Search engines interpret a ’301′ code as a link that has permanently moved to another destination. 301 redirects are the most efficient and search engine friendly way to redirect users to new web page destinations and avoid running into ‘404’ (Page not found) errors when clicking on an old link.

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

You can site using a WP plugin like Simple 301 Redirects, or Redirection, or get a professional to assist you with setting up and redirecting your permalinks correctly to avoid any issues and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up 301 redirections using plugins or get professional help)

Congratulations! Now you know about the built-in system WordPress uses to display SEO-friendly URLs for your posts and improve your search search rankings. To learn more about using Permalinks, refer to the WordPress codex here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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