Wouldn’t it be great if after adding a new page to your WordPress website, the following happened … all from your page URL:

• Potential site visitors could understand what the content was about,
• Search engines would be able to easily discover your page and correctly classify its content to improve your search rankings,
• Every single piece of content added to your website or blog would have its own unique ID, making things easier to manage.

Well, this is what a permalink lets you do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – What Are They?

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

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

Permalinks – Why Do We Need To Use Them?

As you have probably heard by now, WordPress is one of the best Content Management Systems you can use when it comes to publishing search engines optimized content.

WordPress is not only great for SEO out of the box, but there are excellent SEO plugins you can use that can help to fine tuned its SEO aspect further.

If you focus on the SEO aspect of your website, then you cannot ignore the importance of your site’s URLs. Search engines like Google place considerable weight on the structure of a site’s URLs when indexing its site pages.

Permalinks can be used to make the links on your site into “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 why you should use permalinks in WordPress.

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

WordPress uses the link with a string query shown above to locate data inside your database. It does not mean anything to visitors or search engines, and it doesn’t help your website with on-site search engine optimization.

As you can see from the image below, many WordPress site owners haven’t configured their permalinks …

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

To get the greatest SEO benefit from using and improve your site’s traffic results, you should configure your permalinks structure to make it more search engine-friendly by displaying relevant keywords in your URL, instead of meaningless characters.

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

To this …

By default, WordPress URLs are not very search engine-friendly. This tutorial explains how to set up your permalinks in WordPress to display your posts using SEO-friendly URLs.

How To Set Up WordPress Permalinks

In your WordPress dashboard 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 a search engine friendly URL instead for our posts. To do this, we 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 …

(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-deals/three-favorite-european-cruise-destinations

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=1614

(Using permalinks helps visitors and search engines understand what the content is about)

How To Create Search Engine-Friendly Tags In Custom Structure

“Pretty” URLs, or SEO-friendly URLs, are created by adding one or more ‘tags’ in the Custom Structure field:

• %year% – The year the post gets published, displayed as four digits (e.g. ‘2018’)
• %monthnum% – The month the post is published (e.g. ‘06’)
• %day% – The day your post is published (e.g. ‘22’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘17’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘14’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘19’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘4082’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted version of your post title. For example, if your 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 lower case characters and punctuation symbols deleted) in the URL. Tip: You can edit this text 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 selecting ‘Custom Structure’ and using the /%postname%/ tag.

Optional Permalink Settings

If you need to configure custom permalinks for your tag and category URLs here is where you would do this.

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

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

For example, using “recipes” as your category base would make your category links display as ‘http://domain.com/recipes/uncategorized/’.

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

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

To something like this …

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

Remember to save your changes after 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 Notes

Use Short, Descriptive Categories

To get the optimal 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 plugin developer Joost de Valk, here are a few things to consider if you are wondering whether or not to add categories to your permalink structure:

• If your category name is short and descriptive (e.g. uses a relevant keyword or keyword phrase), you may want to use the category tag 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 decrease the SEO benefit.
• If you are going to post content under multiple categories, then it’s recommended that you do not use 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 ”better” permalink structure to use. We recommend choosing the permalink structure you think will suit your needs best and that will make your web address short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We provide more information about WordPress categories in other articles.

Avoid Time-Specific URLs

Another useful tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your site provides news or time-specific information, or there is a special reason why you need to date your content, avoid using date-based permalink options when configuring your site’s URLs.

(Avoid setting up URL structures that date your content)

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

What If My Site Already Has Lots Of Content?

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

If your site is already established or you have a lot of content already indexed in the search engines and you would like to change the permalink structure, make sure that this is absolutely something that needs to be done, as doing so can create issues and errors.

301 Redirection

As you’ve seen in earlier screenshots, some website owners (or whoever set up their site) are unaware of the search-friendly URLs feature of WordPress.

Maybe you started out using the default WordPress URL structure and now you would like to improve your site’s SEO. Maybe your site was configured to display post dates in your URLs and now all of your posts are showing as being 2-3 years old and you want to remove the date tags in the URLs.

The best way to change your permalink structure without negatively affecting your site’s SEO or existing rankings is to add ‘301 redirections’ to point links that were set up using the previous permalinks syntax to page URLs using the new permalinks syntax.

A ’301′ code is interpreted by search engines as a link that has permanently relocated to another destination. 301 redirection is the most efficient and search engine friendly way to redirect users to new web page destinations and avoid ‘404’ (Page not found) errors when clicking on an old link.

To create an effective syntax change and avoid damaging your rankings, sending visitors to broken links, etc. you should install and set up a redirection system before messing with the permalink structure of your site.

You can site or blog using a WordPress plugin like Simple 301 Redirects, or Redirection, or get a professional to assist you with setting up and redirecting your permalinks correctly to avoid problems 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 SEO-friendly URLs for your posts and improve your search results. For additional information on using Permalinks, see the official WordPress documentation here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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