Wouldn’t it be great if after adding a new post to your WordPress website, the following took place … just from your URL:

• Site visitors could quickly tell what the post was about,
• Google would easily discover your post and correctly classify the content to improve your search results,
• Every single post created on your website would have its own unique identifier, making your content easier to manage.

Well, with WordPress permalinks this is really easy to do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

What Are Permalinks?

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 posts or sections of your site or the links you send in an email pointing readers to articles on your site. Some people also call permalinks “pretty” URLs.

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

Why Do You Need To Use Permalinks?

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

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

If you focus on the SEO aspect of your website, then you cannot ignore the importance of your site’s URLs. Google tends to give special consideration to the structure of your site’s URLs when indexing content.

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

Now … let’s take a look at the reason why it’s best to set up permalinks when publishing content in WordPress.

Normally, a default 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 structure to find information inside your database. It does not help your website with on-site SEO.

As you can see from the image below taken from Google search results, many site owners haven’t configured their permalinks to publish search optimized content online …

Although Google is clearly still indexing the above sites, they are missing out on extra SEO benefits.

To get the best SEO benefit out of using and improve your site’s traffic results, you will want to make sure to configure your permalinks structure to make it more SEO-friendly by displaying relevant keywords in your URL, instead of meaningless characters.

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

To something like this …

In this tutorial, you will learn how to configure your WordPress permalinks to display your posts using search engine-friendly URLs instead of the out-of-the-box URL structure and help every new post you publish on your site get better indexing results in search engines like Google.

Setting Up WordPress Permalinks

In your WordPress dashboard click on, 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 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 Settings – Permalinks

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 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/how-to-save-money-on-cruise-travel

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=8003

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

Creating SEO-Friendly Tags

“Pretty” permalinks, or search engine-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. ‘2018’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘02’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘04’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘05’)
• %minute% – The minute the post gets published (e.g. ‘02’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘44’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘7418’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of your post title. For example, if the post title is “Top Five Budget Travel Tips!”, the postname tag will convert this into “top-five-budget-travel-tips” (all lower case letters and punctuation symbol deleted) 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 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 the ‘Custom Structure’ option.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

This section lets you configure custom structures for your tag and category URLs.

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 “topics” as your category base would make your category links display as ‘http://domain.com/topics/uncategorized/’.

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

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

To something like this …

If you leave the optional settings fields blank WordPress uses the defaults.

Remember to save your changes when you have 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 – Additional Info

Categories

To get the optimal benefit out of 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 and author of the WordPress SEO plugin Joost de Valk, here are some things to consider 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 and reduce 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 using category vs no category there really is no perfect permalink structure to use. Choose a permalink structure you think will suit your needs best. Many SEO experts and webmasters recommend making your web address short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We cover WordPress categories in another article.

Create Timeless Posts

Another great tip from Joost de Valk is that unless you plan to run a news website or blog or there is a special reason why you need to create dated web addresses, avoid selecting date-based permalink syntax when configuring your site’s URLs.

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

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

What About Changing Permalinks In Blogs With Published Content?

Normally, your permalinks should be configured when you install a new WordPress site. This should be part of your site 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 want to change the permalink structure, make sure that this is really something that needs doing, as doing so could create issues and errors.

Add 301 Redirection

As you’ve seen in the above screenshots of actual search results, many WordPress site owners (or whoever set up their site) are unaware of the SEO-friendly URLs feature of WordPress.

Maybe you started out using the default WordPress permalinks and now you want to improve your SEO. Perhaps your website 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 remove the date tags of the URLs.

The best way to change your permalink structure without impacting your site’s SEO in a negative way is to use ‘301 redirections’ to point links that were set up using the previous permalinks structure to URLs using the new permalink structure.

A code ‘301’ is interpreted by search engines as a link that has permanently been moved to another destination. 301 redirects are the most efficient and search engine friendly way to redirect visitors to new site destinations and avoid running into ”page not found” errors if following an old link.

To effectively change your permalink structure and avoid damaging your rankings, sending visitors to broken links, etc. you should configure your redirection system before messing with the permalink structure of your site.

You can add a link redirection system to your do this using WordPress redirection 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 issues and troubleshoot any errors.

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

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

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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