Wouldn’t it be great if you could publish a new page on your WordPress website, and the following happened … just from your page URL:

• Potential site visitors could easily glean what your page is about,
• Search engines would easily find your posts and correctly classify their content for better search results,
• Every single post on your website would have a unique ID, making your content easier to manage.

Well, this is what permalinks let you do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – What Are They?

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

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

Permalinks – Why Do We Need To Use Them?

As you are probably aware, WordPress is one of the best CMS tools you can use when it comes to publishing search optimized content.

WordPress is not only great for SEO out of the box, but there are SEO plugins you can install that can easily help to improve its SEO aspect.

If you focus on the SEO aspect of your site or blog, then you should not ignore the importance of its site’s URLs. Search engines like Google tend to give special consideration to the URL structure of your site.

Permalinks can be 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 turn our attention to the reason why you should set up permalinks when publishing content in WordPress.

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

WordPress uses the link with a string query shown above to find data within its database. It does not mean anything to either visitors or search engines, and it doesn’t help your site with on-site SEO.

As the screenshot taken directly from Google search results below shows, many WordPress site owners haven’t configured their permalinks to publish search optimized content …

Although Google is clearly still indexing the above sites, these site owners are potentially missing out on additional SEO benefits.

To get the greatest SEO benefit out of using and improve your site’s rankings, you will want to make sure to set up your permalinks structure to make it more SEO-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 pages can go from this …

To something with an SEO-friendly URL like this …

Out of the box, WordPress post URLs are not very search engine-friendly. This tutorial shows you how to configure the Permalinks section of your WordPress site to get better indexing in search engines.

Setting Up WordPress Permalinks

In your WordPress admin click on, Settings > Permalinks …

This will bring 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 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

In the Common Settings section, select Custom Structure, then add one or more ‘tags’ (see below) to create search engine-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/river-cruises/how-to-save-money-on-cruise-travel

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=598

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

WordPress Permalink 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. ‘08’)
• %day% – The day the post gets published (e.g. ‘27’)
• %hour% – The hour the post is published (e.g. ‘07’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘05’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘27’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘6051’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of the post title. For example, if your post title is “Top Five Budget Travel Tips!”, the postname tag will convert this into “top-five-budget-travel-tips” (all lower case characters and exclamation mark deleted) in the URL. Tip: You can always edit the URL text 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 adding the /%postname%/ tag in ‘Custom Structure’.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

Here you can enter custom structures for your category and tag page URLs.

This changes the ‘base’ category or tag for your URLs using the following structure:

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

For example, using “travel” as your category base will 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 this …

If you leave the fields blank WordPress uses the defaults.

Remember to save your changes when 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 Information

Use Descriptive Categories

To get the most 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 a few things to consider if you are wondering whether you should add categories to your permalinks or not:

• If your domain is short and your category slug is short and descriptive (e.g. adds a relevant keyword or keyword phrase to your URL), 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 or 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 category vs no category there is no ideal permalink structure to use. Use the permalink structure that you think will suit your needs best. Many SEO experts recommend making your web addresses short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We provide more information about WordPress categories in another tutorial.

Avoid Time-Specific Permalink Syntax

Another useful tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your site provides news or time-specific information, or you have any special reason to create dated web URLs, it’s best to avoid selecting date-based permalink syntax for your URLs.

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

Although using permalinks that time-stamp your content may be considered better that using no permalinks at all from an SEO point-of-view, visitors are less likely to click on a post if it is a couple of years old, even if the content is relevant to the answers they are searching for.

What If My Blog Has Published Posts?

Normally, your site’s permalinks should be configured when you install a new WordPress site. This should be part of your site planning process.

If your website 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 something that absolutely needs doing, as doing so could create SEO issues and errors.

Add 301 Redirection

As you’ve seen earlier, many site owners (or whoever set up their site) are unaware of the SEO-friendly URLs feature of WordPress.

Maybe when you started out, your site used the default WordPress URL structure and now you want to optimize your site better for search engines. Perhaps your website or blog was configured to display post dates in your web address and now all of your content is perceived as being outdated and you want to remove the date portion in your URLs.

To modify your URL structure without affecting your site’s SEO or rankings in a negative way you should use ‘301 redirections’ to point links that were set up using the previous permalink syntax to post URLs that use the new permalink structure.

Search engines interpret a ’301′ code as a link that has permanently moved to another location. 301 redirection is the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect visitors to new web page destinations and avoid ‘404’ (Page not found) errors when they click on an old link.

To effectively change your syntax and avoid damaging your search rankings, sending visitors to error pages, etc. you should set up a redirection system before messing with the permalink structure of your site.

You can add a link redirection system to your site using redirection plugins 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 301 redirections using plugins or use the services of a professional)

Congratulations! Now you know how to set up your permalinks to display search engine-friendly URLs for your posts and improve your search results. For additional information on using Permalinks, refer to the official WordPress documentation below:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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