Wouldn’t it be great if after publishing content on your WordPress site, the following happened … all from your URL:

• Potential visitors could easily assess what the page was about,
• Search engines would discover your posts faster,
• Each item of content created on your website or blog would have a unique ID, making your site easier to manage.

Well, this is what a WordPress permalink lets you do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – Definition

Permalinks are the permanent URLs to an individual WordPress post, category, or other taxonomy (a way to organize things together) like archives.

A permalink is the web address that other people will use to link to posts or sections of your site or the links you send in an email pointing to articles on your site. Permalinks are often called “pretty” URLs.

Permalinks make the URLs to each post on your blog permanent, hence a perma-link.

Permalinks – Why 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 great for SEO out of the box, but its SEO aspect can be considerably fine tuned using SEO plugins.

If you focus on the SEO aspect of your site, then you should not ignore the importance of its site’s URLs. Google tends to pay special attention to the URL structure of a site.

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

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

By default, a 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 find data within its database. It does not mean anything to visitors or search engines, and it doesn’t help your website with on-site SEO.

As you can see from the screenshot below taken from Google search listings, many WordPress users have not yet configured their sites to publish search optimized content online …

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

To get greater SEO benefit out of 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 lets you create a custom URL structure for your published and archived posts, so your pages can easily go from this …

To something like this …

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

How To Set Up Your WordPress Permalinks

In your WordPress admin menu, select 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 “pretty” permalinks instead for our posts. To do this, we need to specify a different Permalink structure than the default.

Common Settings – Permalinks

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/budget-cruises/best-value-european-cruise-destinations

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=4233

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

How To Create Permalink Tags

“Pretty” URLs, or SEO-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% – The month the post is published (e.g. ‘09’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘13’)
• %hour% – The hour your post is published (e.g. ‘06’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘51’)
• %second% – The exact second your post gets published (e.g. ‘46’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘4525’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of your post title. For example, if the post title is ”Ten Signs That You’re About To Get Fired From Your Job!”, the postname tag will convert this into “ten-signs-that-youre-about-to-get-fired-from-your-job” (all lower case characters and no punctuation marks) 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 choosing ‘Custom Structure’ and adding the /%postname%/ tag.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

If you need to configure custom permalinks for your category and tag archive page URLs you can do this in this section.

You can change the ‘base’ tag or category of your URLs using the following syntax:

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

For example, changing your category base to “topics” will display your category links as ‘http://domain.com/topics/uncategorized/’.

So, if you add the following to your permalinks Optional > Category base settings section …

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

To something like this …

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

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 – Additional Notes

Categories

To get the greatest benefit out of 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 expert and author of the WordPress SEO plugin Joost de Valk, here are some points to keep in mind 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. uses a relevant keyword or keyword phrase), 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.

Ultimately, when it comes to using category vs no category there is no perfect permalink structure to use. Use a permalink structure that you think will suit your needs best. Your web address should be short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We cover WordPress categories in another tutorial.

Make Your Content Timeless

Another useful tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your website is a news blog or there is a special reason why you need to add dates to your post URLs, it’s best to avoid selecting date-based permalink settings when configuring your blog’s URLs.

(Avoid setting up URL structures that date your posts)

Although setting up URL structures that time-stamp your posts is better that using no permalinks at all from an SEO aspect, people are less likely to click on a post if it is several years old, even if the content is relevant to what they are searching for.

What If My Site Has Lots Of Content?

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

If your website or blog has been running for a while or your site already has many posts indexed in the search engines and you want to change the permalink structure, make sure that this is absolutely necessary, as changing permalinks after your site has already been running for a while could create SEO issues and loss of traffic.

301 Redirects

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

Maybe when you started, your site used the default WordPress URL structure and now you would like to optimize your site better for search engines. Maybe your website or blog was originally set up to display post dates in your URLs and now all of your content is perceived as being out-of-date and you want to remove the date tags of the URLs.

The best way to edit your permalinks without negatively impacting your site’s SEO or rankings is to add ‘301 redirects’ to point links using the previous permalinks syntax to web URLs using the new permalinks syntax.

A code ‘301’ is interpreted by search engines as a link that has permanently been moved. 301 redirects are the most efficient and search engine friendly way to redirect users to new website destinations and avoid ‘404’ (Page not found) errors when clicking on an old link.

To effectively change your syntax and avoid damaging your search rankings, sending visitors to error pages, etc. you will need to 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 help you set up and redirect your permalinks correctly to avoid issues and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up link redirections using plugins or get professional assistance)

Congratulations! Now you know about the built-in system WordPress uses 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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