Wouldn’t it be great if you could just publish a new post on your website, and the following took place … just from your page address:

• Potential visitors could quickly gain an understanding of what the page is about,
• Search engines would be able to easily find your pages and correctly index their content to improve your search results,
• Every content item created on your website would have its own unique identifier, making your site easier to manage.

Well, this is what a permalink lets you do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – Definition

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

A permalink is the URL that other people 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 blog. Some people also call permalinks “pretty” URLs.

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

Why Do You Need To Use Permalinks?

Hopefully, by now 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 there are excellent SEO plugins you can install that will help to enhance its SEO aspect considerably.

If you are looking to optimize the SEO aspect of your site or blog, then you cannot ignore the importance of its URLs. Search engines like Google place considerable weight on the structure of a site’s URLs when indexing pages.

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

Now … let’s take a look at why it’s best to configure your permalinks in WordPress.

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

WordPress uses the above link structure with a string query to locate data inside your database. It doesn’t really mean anything to search engines or visitors, and it doesn’t help your site with on-site search engine optimization.

As you can see from the screenshot image below, many WordPress users haven’t yet configured their sites to use permalinks …

Although Google is still indexing the above sites, many site owners are potentially missing out on extra SEO benefits.

To get greater SEO benefit from using and improve your site’s rankings, you should 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 content can go from this …

To something like this …

In this step-by-step tutorial, you will learn how to configure your WordPress permalinks to display your posts with search engine-friendly URLs instead of the default URL structure and help every new post you publish automatically get better indexing in search engines like Google.

How To Set Up WordPress Permalinks

In your WP admin menu, 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 one.

Permalinks - Common Settings

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/romantic-cruise-holiday-deals

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=5413

(Using post name permalinks helps visitors understand what the page is about)

Creating Permalink Tags

“Pretty” URLs, or SEO-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. ‘23’)
• %hour% – The hour your post is published (e.g. ‘11’)
• %minute% – The minute the post gets published (e.g. ‘30’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘47’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘8678’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of your post title. For example, if your post title is ”It Ain’t Worth Doin’ No More!”, the postname tag will convert this into “it-aint-worth-doin-no-more” (all letters converted to lower case and no exclamation symbols) in the URL. Tip: You can always 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 choosing the ‘Custom Structure’ setting and adding the /%postname%/ tag.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

If you need to configure custom structures for your category and tag pages you can do this in this section.

This changes the ‘base’ category or tag 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 display your category links as ‘http://domain.com/travel/uncategorized/’.

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

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

To something like this …

If you leave the optional settings fields blank the defaults will be used.

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 – Tips

Use Descriptive Categories

To get the best possible benefit from using Permalinks, it’s important 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 Joost de Valk, here are some points to consider if you are wondering whether you should add categories to your permalinks or not:

• If your category is short and descriptive (e.g. uses a relevant keyword or keyword phrase), 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 copy 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 using category vs no category there really is no ideal permalink structure to use. Use a permalink structure you think will suit your needs 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 another article.

Don’t Use Date Permalinks

Another useful tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your goal is to run a news blog or you have any special reason to add dates to your URLs, avoid selecting date-based permalinks when configuring your site’s URLs.

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

Although setting up permalinks that date your posts may be considered better that using no permalinks at all from an SEO perspective, people are less likely to click on a post that is several years old, even if the content is relevant to what they are searching for.

What About An Established Site?

Normally, your permalinks should be set up when you perform a new WordPress installation. This should be part of your site planning process.

If your site has been running for a while or you have a lot of content already indexed in the search engines and you want to change the permalink structure, make sure that this is something that absolutely needs doing, as changing permalinks after your site has been running for a while can create SEO issues and errors.

301 Redirection

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

Maybe you started out using the default WordPress URL structure and now you would like to improve your SEO. Maybe your website was configured 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 remove the date tags in your URLs.

The best way to change your permalinks without impacting your site’s SEO or rankings in a negative way is to add ‘301 redirections’ to reassign links using the old URL syntax to links using the new permalink syntax.

Search engines interpret a code ‘301’ as a link that has permanently relocated. 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 effectively change your syntax and avoid damaging your search rankings, sending visitors to broken links, etc. you should add a redirection system before changing the permalink structure of your site.

You can site using a redirection 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 problems and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up 301 redirections using redirection 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 and improve your search results. To learn more about using Permalinks, see the official WordPress documentation below:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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