Wouldn’t it be great if you could simply publish a new page on your WordPress site, and the following would then take place … just from your page URL:

• Site visitors could quickly tell what the page is about,
• Search engines would be able to discover your posts faster,
• Every content item created on your website would have a unique ID, making your site easier to manage.

Well, this is what a permalink lets you do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalink – What Is It?

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

A permalink is the URL that others will 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 web address pointing to each post on your site permanent, hence a perma-link.

Why Do You Need To Use Permalinks?

Hopefully, you are probably aware by now that, WordPress is one of the best CMS applications available when it comes to publishing search engines optimized content.

WordPress is not only great for SEO out of the box, but its SEO aspect can be further finetuned with excellent SEO plugins.

If you are looking to optimize the SEO aspect of your site or blog, then you should not ignore the importance of its URLs. Search engines like Google tend to pay special attention to the structure of URLs when indexing its site pages.

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

Now … let’s review why you may need to configure your permalinks in WordPress.

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

WordPress uses the above link structure to find information within its database. It doesn’t really mean anything to search engines or visitors, and it doesn’t help your site with on-site search engine optimization.

As the screenshot below shows, many site owners are still using default settings when publishing their content …

Although these sites are still getting their content indexed on search engines, they are potentially missing out on extra SEO benefits.

To get optimal 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 characters.

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

To something like this …

In this step-by-step tutorial, you will learn how to configure your WordPress permalinks to display posts using SEO-friendly URLs instead of the out-of-the-box URL structure and help every new post you publish on your site get better indexing in search engines.

How To Configure WordPress Permalinks

From your WordPress main 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 “pretty” permalink instead for our posts. To do this, we will need to specify a different Permalink structure than the one set by default.

Common Settings – Permalinks

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

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=6478

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

SEO-Friendly Tags

“Pretty” permalinks, or search engine-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. ‘12’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘10’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘17’)
• %minute% – The minute your post gets published (e.g. ‘16’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘20’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘4082’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of your post title. For example, if the 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 removed punctuation marks) in the URL. Tip: You can always edit the wording in your post title 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 choosing ‘Custom Structure’ and using the /%postname%/ tag.

Optional Permalink Settings

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

You can change 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, changing your category base to “news” will display your category links as ‘http://domain.com/news/category_name/’.

So, if you make the following change in your permalinks Optional > Category base settings field …

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

To this …

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

Remember to save any 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 Information

Categories

To get more SEO benefit from 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 keep in mind if you are wondering whether or not to add categories to your permalinks:

• If your category name is short and descriptive (e.g. adds a relevant keyword or keyword phrase to your URL), 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 reduce the SEO benefit.
• Do you plan to post content under only one category or multiple categories? 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 adding category vs no category there is no ideal permalink structure to use. Choose the permalink structure that you think will suit your site best. Many SEO experts and webmasters recommend making your post URLs short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We cover WordPress categories in another article.

Make Your Posts Timeless

Another great tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your website provides news, or you have a special reason to add dates to your URLs, avoid selecting date-based permalink syntax for your blog’s URLs.

(Avoid using URL structures that date your content)

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

What About Changing Permalinks In Blogs With Published Posts?

Normally, your permalinks should be set up when you first install WordPress. 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 really something that needs doing, as making changes to permalinks after your site has been running for a while could create SEO issues and errors.

301 Redirection

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

Maybe when you started out, your site used the default WordPress permalinks 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 posts are showing as being old and you want to remove the date portion in the URLs.

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

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

To effectively change your permalink structure and avoid SEO problems, sending visitors to error pages, etc. you will need to install and set up your redirection system before messing with the permalink structure of your site.

You can site using a redirection plugin like Simple 301 Redirects, or Redirection, or use the services of a professional to help you set up and redirect your permalinks correctly to avoid any issues and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up link redirections using a WP plugin or get professional assistance)

Congratulations! Now you know how to change your blog to display search engine-friendly URLs for your posts and improve your search search rankings. To learn more about using Permalinks, see the official WordPress documentation here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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