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

• Users could understand what the page was about,
• Google could easily discover your post and correctly classify its content for better search results,
• Every post you create on your site would have its own unique identifier, making your site easier to manage.

Well, this is what a permalink lets you do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – Definition

A permalink is the permanent URL to your individual posts, categories and other taxonomies (a way to group things together) like archives.

A permalink is the URL that other people use to link to posts or sections of your site or the links you send in an email pointing to a specific item of content on your blog. Some people also call permalinks “pretty” URLs.

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

Why Use Permalinks?

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

WordPress is not only well optimized straight out of the box, but its SEO aspect can be considerably finetuned with SEO plugins.

If you focus on the SEO aspect of your site or blog, then you should not ignore the importance of your site’s URLs. Google tends to give special significance to the structure of your site’s URLs when indexing site pages.

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

Now … let’s see the reason why you should use 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 above link structure with a string query to locate data inside your database. It doesn’t really help your site with on-site search engine optimization.

As you can see from the image below taken from Google search results, many site owners are still using out of the box settings when publishing content …

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

To get the most SEO benefit out of using and improve your site’s traffic results, 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 the ability to create a custom URL structure for your published and archived posts, so your content can easily go from something that is non-SEO friendly like this …

To this …

In this tutorial, you will learn how to set up your WordPress permalinks to display posts using SEO-friendly URLs instead of the default URL structure and help every new post you add automatically get better indexing in Google.

Changing WordPress Permalinks

In your WP administration menu, select 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 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 Permalink 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 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/cruise-travel/how-to-save-money-on-cruise-travel

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=5459

(Using post name permalinks helps readers understand what your post is about)

Pretty 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 gets published, four digits (e.g. ‘2018’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘03’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘01’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘11’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘56’)
• %second% – The exact second the post gets published (e.g. ‘57’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘6349’)
• %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 lower case letters and no exclamation marks) in the URL. Tip: You can edit the words 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 adding the /%postname%/ tag in ‘Custom Structure’.

Optional Permalink Settings

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

You can change the ‘base’ category or tag 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 would display your category links 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 when 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 – Tips

Set Up Categories

To get the optimal benefit from using Permalinks, it’s important 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 expert and author of the WordPress SEO plugin Joost de Valk, here are a few points to keep in mind if you are wondering whether you should add categories to your permalinks or not:

• If your category name is short and descriptive (e.g. uses a relevant keyword or keyword phrase), you may want to add the category tag 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 reduce 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 adding category vs no category there is no ideal permalink structure to use. Choose the permalink structure that you think will suit your needs best. SEO experts recommend making your web addresses short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We cover WordPress categories in other articles.

Make Your Posts Timeless

Another tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your goal is to run a news website or blog or you have a special reason to create dated website URLs, avoid selecting date-based permalink syntax when setting up your blog’s URLs.

(Avoid setting up 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 If My Site Has Content?

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

If your website or blog is already established or your site already has a lot of 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 making changes to permalinks after your site has already been up and running for a while can create issues and errors.

301 Redirects

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

Maybe when you started, your site used the default WordPress permalinks and now you want to optimize your site better for search engines. Maybe 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 of the URLs.

The best way to edit your permalinks without negatively impacting your site’s SEO or rankings is to use ‘301 redirects’ to point links that use the old permalink syntax to post URLs that use the new permalinks structure.

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

To create an effective permalink structure change and avoid SEO problems, sending visitors to broken links, etc. you will need to set up a redirection system before messing with the permalink structure of your site.

You can site or blog using a WP redirection plugin like Simple 301 Redirects, or Redirection, or use the services of a professional to assist you with setting up and redirecting your permalinks correctly to avoid any issues and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up 301 redirects using a WP plugin or use the services of a professional)

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

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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