Wouldn’t it be great if you could publish content on your WordPress site, and the following happened … all from your web address:

• Readers could gain an understanding of what the page is about,
• Google would easily find your pages and correctly classify their content to improve your search rankings,
• Each piece of content you create on your site would have a unique ID, making your site easier to manage.

Well, with permalinks you can!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

What Are Permalinks?

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

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

Permalinks – Why Do We Need To Use Them?

As you have probably heard by now, WordPress is one of the best CMS tools available when it comes to SEO.

WordPress is not only well optimized right out of the box, but there are excellent SEO plugins you can install that will help to improve its SEO aspect.

If you focus on the SEO aspect of your website, then you should not ignore the importance of your URLs. Google tends to give special consideration 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 usability, aesthetics, and forward-compatibility of your links.

Now … let’s review the reason why you may need to configure your permalinks when publishing content in WordPress.

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

WordPress uses the above link structure with a string query to locate information inside its database. It does not mean much to anyone, and it doesn’t help your site with on-site search engine optimization.

As you can see from the image below, many site owners have not yet set up their sites to use permalinks …

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

To get more SEO benefit from using and improve your site’s traffic results, you should set up 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 you the ability to create a custom URL structure for your published and archived posts, so your content can easily go from something that is non-SEO friendly like this …

To something with an SEO-friendly URL like this …

Out of the box, WordPress post URLs are not very search engine-friendly. In this tutorial, you will learn how to configure the Permalinks section of your WordPress site to help your content rank better in Google.

Changing Your WordPress Permalinks

In your WP admin menu, 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 search engine friendly URLs instead for our posts. To do this, we will need to specify a different Permalink structure than the default.

Permalinks > Common 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 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-tips/3-favourite-european-river-cruises

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=534

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

Pretty URL 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. ‘11’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘15’)
• %hour% – The hour the post is published (e.g. ‘20’)
• %minute% – The minute your post is published (e.g. ‘40’)
• %second% – The exact second your post is published (e.g. ‘04’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘3487’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted version of your post title. For example, if your post title is ”Ten Best Hotels In Cote D’Azur!”, the postname tag will convert this into “ten-best-hotels-in-cote-dazur” (all letters converted to lower case and no punctuation marks) in the URL. Tip: You can always edit the URL wording 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 adding the /%postname%/ tag in ‘Custom Structure’.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

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

You can change the ‘base’ tag or category URLs using the following structure:

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

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

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 this …

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

Remember to save your changes when 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

Use Descriptive Categories

To get the best SEO benefit from 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 some things to consider if you are wondering whether or not to add categories to your permalink structure:

• 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 share 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 adding category vs no category there really is no perfect permalink structure to use. Choose a permalink structure that you think will suit your site best. Many SEO experts and webmasters recommend making your web addresses short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We provide detailed information about WordPress categories in other articles.

Create Timeless Posts

Another useful tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your goal is to run a news site or you have any special reason to date your site’s content, it’s best to avoid selecting date-based permalink options for your blog’s URLs.

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

Although using permalinks that date your content is 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.

Changing Your Permalink Structure In Blog With Indexed Content

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

If your website or blog is already established or your site already has a lot of 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 making changes to permalinks after your site has already been up and running for a while can create issues and loss of traffic.

Add 301 Redirects

As you’ve seen in earlier screenshots, many WordPress site owners (or whoever set up their site) seem to be unaware of the permalinks feature of WordPress.

Maybe you started out using the default WordPress permalinks and now you would like to improve your SEO. Perhaps your website was configured to display post dates in your URLs and now all of your posts are perceived as being outdated and you want to delete the date portion in the permalinks.

The best way to edit your URL structure without affecting your site’s SEO in a negative way is to use ‘301 redirections’ to reassign all links using the old URL structure to web addresses using the new structure.

Search engines interpret a ’301′ code as a link that has permanently been relocated. 301 redirection is the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect users to new website destinations and avoid ‘404’ (Page not found) errors if they click on an old link.

To effectively change your permalink structure and avoid damaging your search rankings, sending visitors to error pages, etc. you should configure your redirection system before changing the permalink structure of your site.

You can WP site using a plugin like Simple 301 Redirects, or Redirection, or get a professional to help you set up and redirect your permalinks correctly to avoid issues 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 search engine-friendly URLs for your posts and improve your search search rankings. For additional information on using Permalinks, refer to the WordPress codex below:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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