Wouldn’t it be great if you could just add content to your site, and the following happened … all from your post URL:

• Visitors could gain an understanding of what the page is about,
• Google would find your posts faster,
• Each content item created on your site would have its own unique identifier, making your content easier to manage.

Well, with WordPress permalinks this is very easy to do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

What’s A Permalink?

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 URL that visitors and search engines 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 URL pointing to each post on your site permanent, hence a perma-link.

Permalinks – Why Do You Need To Use Them?

Hopefully, you probably know by now 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 the SEO aspect can be considerably enhanced using SEO plugins.

If you focus on the SEO aspect of your site or blog, then you should not ignore the importance of your URLs. Google places 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 memorable and more “search engine friendly” URLs. Permalinks are also used to improve the aesthetics, usability, and forward-compatibility of your links.

Now … let’s see the reason why it’s best to use permalinks in WordPress.

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

WordPress uses the above link structure to locate information inside its database. It doesn’t really mean much to anyone, and it doesn’t help your website with on-site SEO.

As the screenshot below shows, many WordPress site owners haven’t configured their sites to publish search optimized content …

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

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

WordPress offers you the ability to create a custom URL structure for your published and archived posts, so your pages can easily go from something that is non-SEO friendly like this …

To 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 default linking structure and help every new post you publish get better indexing in search engines like Google.

Changing Your WordPress Permalinks

Log into your WordPress admin and click on Settings > Permalinks …

This will bring 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 “pretty” permalinks instead for our posts. To do this, we will need to specify a different Permalink structure than the default one.

Common Settings – Permalinks

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/europe-travel/river-cruise-holiday-bargains

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=858

(Using permalinks helps readers and search engines understand what your page is about)

How To Create Permalink Tags In Custom Structure

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

• %year% – The year of the post, displayed as four digits (e.g. ‘2018’)
• %monthnum% – The month your post is published (e.g. ‘07’)
• %day% – The day the post gets published (e.g. ‘01’)
• %hour% – The hour the post gets published (e.g. ‘19’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘41’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘08’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘1948’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of your post title. For example, if your post title is ”Ten Signs That You’re About To Get Fired From Your Job!”, the postname tag will convert this into “ten-signs-that-youre-about-to-get-fired-from-your-job” (all lower case characters and no punctuation symbols) 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 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 ‘Custom Structure’ and adding the /%postname%/ tag.

Optional Permalink Settings

This section lets you set up custom structures for your category and tag pages.

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, changing your category base to “recipes” would display your category links as ‘http://domain.com/recipes/uncategorized/’.

So, if you enter the following in your permalinks Optional > Category base settings section …

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

To this …

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

Remember to save any 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 – Additional Information

Use Short, Descriptive Categories

To get more benefit out of using Permalinks, remember 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 permalink structure:

• If your category 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 or copy and decrease 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 category vs no category there really is no ideal permalink structure to use. Choose the permalink structure you think will suit your site best. Your post URLs should be short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We provide more information about WordPress categories in other articles.

Create Timeless Posts

Another useful tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your website provides news, or there is a special reason why you need to create dated post URLs, avoid using date-based permalink options when setting up your site’s URLs.

(Avoid using URL structures that date your posts)

Although setting up URL structures that date your content is better that using no permalinks at all from an SEO aspect, people are less likely to click on posts that are several years old, even if the content is relevant to the answers they are searching for.

What If My Site Has Published Content?

Normally, it’s best to configure your permalinks when you perform a new WordPress installation. This should be part of your site 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 would like to change the permalink structure, make sure that this is something that absolutely needs doing, as changing permalinks after your site has already been up and running for a while could create SEO issues and loss of traffic.

301 Redirects

As you’ve seen in the above screenshots of actual search results, many WordPress users (or their web developers) seem to be unaware of the SEO-friendly URLs feature of WordPress.

Maybe when you started, your site used the default WordPress URL structure and now you would like to optimize your site better for search engines. Perhaps your website was configured to display post dates in your URLs and now all of your content is perceived as being out-of-date and you want to remove the date portion in the permalinks.

The best way to edit your permalink structure without impacting your site’s SEO or rankings in a negative way is to use ‘301 redirections’ to point all links that were set up using the previous URL syntax to web addresses using the new permalinks syntax.

Search engines interpret a ’301′ code as a link that has permanently relocated. 301 redirection is the most efficient and search engine friendly way to redirect users to new website destinations and avoid running into ‘404’ (Page not found) errors if following an old link.

To create an effective permalink structure change and avoid SEO problems, sending visitors to error pages, etc. you should add 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 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 problems and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up a link redirection system for your changed permalinks using plugins or use the services of a professional)

Congratulations! Now you know how to set up your WordPress permalinks to display SEO-friendly URLs for your posts. To learn more about using Permalinks, see the official WordPress documentation below:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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