Wouldn’t it be great if after publishing a new page on your site, the following took place … just from your post address:

• Potential site visitors could understand what the post was about,
• Search engines would find your posts faster,
• Every item of content on your website or blog would have its own unique identifier, making things easier to manage.

Well, with WordPress permalinks this can easily be done!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – Definition

A permalink is the permanent URL to an individual post, category, or other taxonomy (a way to group things together) like archives.

A permalink is the URL that others use to link to your articles or sections of your site or the links you send in emails pointing to articles on your site. Some people also call permalinks “pretty” URLs.

Permalinks make the web address pointing to each post on your blog permanent, hence a permalink.

Permalinks – Why Do We Need To Use Them?

As you probably know, WordPress is one of the best CMS applications available when it comes to publishing search optimized content.

WordPress is not only well optimized right out of the box, but its SEO aspect can be further enhanced using SEO plugins.

If you are looking to optimize the SEO aspect of your site or blog, then you cannot ignore the importance of your URLs. Search engines like Google tend to give special significance to the structure of your site’s URLs when indexing content.

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 usability, aesthetics, and forward-compatibility of your links.

Now … let’s turn our attention to the reason why it’s best to set up permalinks when publishing content in WordPress.

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

The above link structure is used by WordPress to find information within its database. It does not 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 sites to use permalinks …

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

To get the most SEO benefit from using and improve your site’s rankings, you will want to make sure to configure your permalinks structure to make it more SEO-friendly by displaying relevant keywords in your URL, instead of meaningless characters.

WordPress offers the ability to create a custom URL structure for your published posts, so your content 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. In this step-by-step tutorial, you will learn how to configure your permalinks in WordPress to display your posts using search engine-friendly URLs.

How To Change WordPress Permalinks

In your WordPress dashboard area 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 “pretty” permalink instead for our posts. To do this, we need to specify a different Permalink structure than the one set by 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/budget-travel/romantic-cruise-holiday-deals

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=2976

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

Permalink Tags

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

• %year% – The year the post is published, displayed as four digits (e.g. ‘2017’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘08’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘16’)
• %hour% – The hour your post gets published (e.g. ‘18’)
• %minute% – The minute the post gets published (e.g. ‘03’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘07’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘5068’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of your post title. For example, if the 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 letters converted to lower case and removed exclamation marks) in the URL. Tip: You can edit the words in your post titles 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 selecting the ‘Custom Structure’ option and adding the /%postname%/ tag.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

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

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

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

For example, using “recipes” as your category base will display your category links as ‘http://domain.com/recipes/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 looking like this …

To something like this …

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

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 Notes

Set Up Your Categories

To get the best possible 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 plugin developer Joost de Valk, here are some things to consider if you are wondering whether you should add categories to your permalink structure or not:

• If your domain is short and 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 share and reduce 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 really is no perfect permalink structure to use. Use a permalink structure that you think will suit your site best. Your web address should be short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We provide detailed information about WordPress categories in other articles.

Avoid Using Date-Based Permalinks

Another tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your site is a news site or you have a special reason to date your content, it’s best to avoid using date-based permalink syntax when setting up your URLs.

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

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

Changing Permalinks In Site With Published Content

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

If your site has been running for a while or you have a lot of content already 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 can create SEO issues and loss of traffic.

Use 301 Redirection

As you’ve seen earlier, some WordPress site owners (or whoever set up their site) are unaware of the permalinks feature of WordPress.

Maybe you started out using the default WordPress URL structure and now you want to improve your site’s SEO. Maybe your website was originally set up to display post dates in your web address and now all of your content is showing as being old and you want to remove the date portion of the URLs.

To edit your permalink structure without affecting your site’s SEO or rankings in a negative way you should use ‘301 redirections’ to reassign links that use the old URL structure to post URLs using the new permalinks syntax.

Search engines interpret a code ‘301’ as a link that has permanently been relocated. 301 redirects are the most efficient and search engine friendly way to redirect visitors to new website 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 broken links, etc. you will need to set up your redirection system before messing with the permalink structure of your site.

You can add a link redirection system to your site or blog using a WordPress plugin like Simple 301 Redirects, or Redirection, or get a professional to help you set up and redirect your permalinks correctly to avoid problems and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up link redirections using a WP plugin 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. For additional information on using Permalinks, refer to the WordPress codex here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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