Wouldn’t it be great if you could add content to your WordPress site, and the following happened … all from your URL:

• Readers could easily glean what your page was about,
• Search engines would be able to easily discover your pages and correctly index their content for better search rankings,
• Every single post published on your site would have its own unique ID, making things easier to manage.

Well, with permalinks you can!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – Definition

A permalink is the permanent URL to an individual WordPress post, category, or other taxonomy (a way to organize things together) like archives.

A permalink is the web address that others use to link to articles or sections of your site or the links you send in emails pointing readers to content items on your blog. Some people also call permalinks “pretty” URLs.

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

Permalinks – Why Do We Need To Use Them?

Hopefully, you are probably aware 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 great for SEO out of the box, but there are excellent SEO plugins you can use that can further help to enhance its SEO aspect.

If you focus on the SEO aspect of your website, then you cannot ignore the importance of its site’s URLs. Google tends to give special significance to the URL structure of a site.

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 aesthetics, usability, and forward-compatibility of your links.

Now … let’s see why you may need to set up permalinks if publishing content in WordPress.

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

WordPress uses the link structure with a string query shown above to find data within its database. It does not help your site with on-site SEO.

As the screenshot below shows, many WordPress users are still using out-of-the-box settings when publishing content …

Although these sites are still getting their content indexed on search engines, 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 set up your permalinks structure to make it more search engine-friendly by displaying relevant keywords in your URL, instead of meaningless characters.

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

To something with an SEO-friendly URL like this …

In this step-by-step tutorial, you will learn how to set up the Permalinks section of your WordPress site to display your posts using SEO-friendly URLs instead of the out-of-the-box linking structure and help every new post you publish on your site or blog automatically get better indexing in search engines.

How To Configure WordPress Permalinks

In your WordPress admin click on, 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 a search engine friendly URL instead for our posts. To do this, we will need to specify a different Permalink structure than the default.

Common Permalink Settings

In the Common Settings section, select Custom Structure, then add one or more ‘tags’ (see below) to create SEO-friendly URLs …

(Change 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/seven-best-european-cruise-destinations

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=8366

(Using post name permalinks helps visitors understand what the content 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 your post is published, displayed as four digits (e.g. ‘2017’)
• %monthnum% – The month the post gets published (e.g. ‘09’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘14’)
• %hour% – The hour the post gets published (e.g. ‘01’)
• %minute% – The minute your post is published (e.g. ‘04’)
• %second% – The exact second your post is published (e.g. ‘60’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘2226’)
• %postname% – A sanitized 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 letters converted to lower case and exclamation symbols deleted) in the URL. Tip: You can 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 choosing the ‘Custom Structure’ setting and using the /%postname%/ tag.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

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

You can change 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, changing your category base to “news” would make your category links display as ‘http://domain.com/news/category_name/’.

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

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

To something like this …

If you leave the 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 – Tips

Use Short, Descriptive Categories

To get the best SEO benefit out of using Permalinks, you will need 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 expert and author of the WordPress SEO plugin Joost de Valk, here are a few points to keep in mind if you are wondering whether you should add categories to your permalinks or not:

• If your category name is short and descriptive (e.g. uses a relevant keyword or keyword phrase), 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 are going 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 category vs no category there really is no perfect permalink structure to use. Choose a permalink structure that you think will suit your needs best. SEO experts recommend making your post URLs short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We provide more information about WordPress categories in other tutorials.

Make Your Posts Timeless

Another tip from Joost de Valk is that unless you plan to run a news website or blog or you have any special reason to create dated web URLs, it’s best to avoid selecting date-based permalink options when configuring your URLs.

(Avoid using URL structures that date your posts)

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 If My Site Has Lots Of Content?

Normally, it’s best to set up your permalinks when you perform a new WordPress installation. 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 want to change the permalink structure, make sure that this is something that absolutely needs doing, as making changes to permalinks after your site has been going for a while can create issues and errors.

301 Redirects

As you’ve seen in the above screenshots of actual search results, some website owners (or their web developers) are unaware of the SEO-friendly URLs feature of WordPress.

Maybe you started out using the default WordPress permalinks and now you would like to optimize your site better for search engines. Maybe your website was configured 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 portion of the permalinks.

To modify your permalinks without negatively impacting your site’s SEO or rankings you should add ‘301 redirects’ to point all links that use the previous permalink syntax to web addresses that use the new permalink structure.

Search engines interpret a ’301′ code as a link that has been permanently moved to another location. 301 redirects are the most efficient and search engine friendly way to redirect users to new web page destinations and avoid running into page errors if following an old link.

To effectively change your permalink syntax and avoid SEO problems, sending visitors to broken links, etc. you will need to configure your redirection system before messing with the permalink structure of your site.

You can site or blog using a WP 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 issues and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up URL redirections using plugins or use the services of a professional)

Congratulations! Now you know how to set up your WordPress site or blog to display SEO-friendly URLs for your posts and improve your search results. For additional information on using Permalinks, see the WordPress codex here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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