Wouldn’t it be great if you could add content to your website or blog, and the following happened … just from your URL:

• Users could quickly gain an understanding of what your page was about,
• Search engines would be able to easily discover your posts and correctly classify their content to improve your search rankings,
• Every single post published on your site would have a unique ID, making your site easier to manage.

Well, with WordPress permalinks you can easily do this!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – Definition

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

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

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

Permalinks – Why Do You Need To Use Them?

Hopefully, you are probably aware that, 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 there are SEO plugins you can install that can help to improve its SEO aspect.

If you are looking to optimize the SEO aspect of your website, then you should not ignore the importance of its site’s URLs. Google tends to give special significance to the structure of a site’s URLs when indexing its site pages.

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

Now … let’s turn our attention to why you may need to use permalinks in WordPress.

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

WordPress uses the above link with a string query to find data inside its database. It doesn’t really mean much to anyone, and it doesn’t help your site with on-site SEO.

As you can see from the image below, many WordPress site owners haven’t yet set up their sites to publish search optimized content …

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

To get the best possible SEO benefit out of using and improve your site’s traffic results, you should 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 your WordPress permalinks to display posts using SEO-friendly URLs.

Configuring WordPress Permalinks

In your WordPress administration menu, 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 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 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-europe/how-to-save-money-on-cruise-travel

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=123

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

How To Create Pretty WordPress URLs

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

• %year% – The year the post gets published, four digits (e.g. ‘2018’)
• %monthnum% – The month the post is published (e.g. ‘10’)
• %day% – The day your post gets published (e.g. ‘22’)
• %hour% – The hour your post is published (e.g. ‘15’)
• %minute% – The minute your post gets published (e.g. ‘55’)
• %second% – The exact second the post is published (e.g. ‘47’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘4504’)
• %postname% – A sanitized 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 lower case letters and no punctuation marks) in the URL. Tip: You can always edit this 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 set custom structures for your category and tag archive page URLs.

This changes the ‘base’ category or tag URLs using the following syntax:

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

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

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

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

To this …

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

Remember to save any 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 greatest SEO benefit out of using Permalinks, remember 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 some points to consider if you are wondering whether or not to add categories to your permalinks:

• If your domain is short and your category name 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 share or 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 using category vs no category there is no ideal permalink structure to use. We recommend choosing the permalink structure you think will suit your needs best and that will make your post URLs short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We cover WordPress categories in other articles.

Create Timeless Posts

Another useful tip from Joost de Valk is that unless you run a news blog or there is a special reason why you need to create dated web addresses, avoid using date-based permalink syntax for your site’s URLs.

(Avoid setting up URL structures that time-stamp your posts)

Visitors are less likely to click on a post if it is several years old, even if the content is relevant to the answers they are searching for.

What If My Blog Already Has Indexed Content?

Normally, it’s best to configure your site’s permalinks when you first install WordPress. This should be part of your site planning process.

If your site has been running for a while 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 really necessary, as doing so could create SEO issues and loss of traffic.

301 Redirects

As you’ve seen earlier, many site owners (or their web developers) are unaware of the SEO-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. Perhaps your site was originally set up to display post dates in your URLs and now all of your posts are showing as being old and you want to delete the date tags of the URLs.

To change your URL structure without negatively affecting your site’s SEO or existing rankings you will need to add ‘301 redirects’ to reassign links that were set up using the old permalink syntax to URLs that use the new syntax.

A ’301′ code is interpreted by search engines as a link that has been permanently moved. 301 redirects are the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect visitors to new site destinations and avoid running into ‘404’ (Page not found) errors if they click on an old link.

To effectively change your syntax and avoid SEO problems, sending visitors to error pages, etc. you should configure your 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 assist you with setting up and redirecting your permalinks correctly to avoid issues and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up 301 redirections using redirection plugins or get professional help)

Congratulations! Now you know how to configure your WordPress site or blog’s permalinks to display search engine-friendly URLs for your posts. To learn more about using Permalinks, see the WordPress codex below:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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