Wouldn’t it be great if after adding new content to your website or blog, the following could happen … all from your URL:

• Users could easily tell what your page was about,
• Search engines would easily discover your posts and correctly classify their content to improve your search results,
• Every single content item created on your website would have a unique ID, making your content easier to manage.

Well, this is what permalinks let you do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – Definition

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 other people use to link to your articles or sections of your site or the links you send in emails pointing readers to articles on your site. Some people also refer to permalinks as “pretty” URLs.

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

Why Use Permalinks?

As you probably know, WordPress is one of the best CMS applications you can use when it comes to SEO.

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

If you focus on the SEO aspect of your website, then you cannot ignore the importance of your URLs. Google places considerable weight on the structure of your site’s URLs when indexing its pages.

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

Now … let’s see why you should set up permalinks in WordPress.

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

WordPress uses the above link structure with a string query to find information within your database. It doesn’t really help your site with on-site SEO.

As you can see from the image below, many site owners haven’t configured their sites to use permalinks …

Although Google is clearly still indexing the above sites, many site owners are potentially missing out on extra SEO benefits.

To get the best possible 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 search engine-friendly by displaying relevant keywords in your URL, instead of meaningless characters.

WordPress lets you create a custom URL structure for your published posts, so your pages can go from something that is non-SEO friendly like this …

To something like this …

Out of the box, WordPress post URLs are not very SEO-friendly. This step-by-step tutorial shows you how to configure the Permalinks section of your WordPress site to help your content rank better in search engines like Google.

Configuring WordPress Permalinks

From your WordPress administration menu, select 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 a “pretty” permalink instead for our posts. To do this, we will need to specify a different Permalink structure than the 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 …

(Set up 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/river-cruise-holiday-bargains

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=7391

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

Creating 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 your post is published, four digits (e.g. ‘2018’)
• %monthnum% – The month the post gets published (e.g. ‘02’)
• %day% – The day the post gets published (e.g. ‘26’)
• %hour% – The hour the post is published (e.g. ‘21’)
• %minute% – The minute the post gets published (e.g. ‘19’)
• %second% – The exact second your post is published (e.g. ‘32’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘953’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of the 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 characters and punctuation marks deleted) in the URL. Tip: You can 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 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 choosing the ‘Custom Structure’ option and using the /%postname%/ tag.

Optional Permalink Settings

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

You can change the ‘base’ tag or category URLs using the following syntax:

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

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

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

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

To this …

If you leave the optional settings fields blank the default settings will be used.

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 Info

Categories

To get the most 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 and author of the WordPress SEO plugin Joost de Valk, here are a few things to consider if you are wondering whether or not to add categories to your permalink structure:

• If your category is short and descriptive (e.g. adds a relevant keyword or keyword phrase to your URL), 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 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 category vs no category there is no perfect permalink structure to use. Choose the permalink structure you think will suit your needs best. Your web address should be short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We cover WordPress categories in other tutorials.

Create Timeless Posts

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

(Avoid using URL structures that time-stamp your posts)

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 Blog Has Content?

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

If your website or blog has been running for a while or your site already has many posts 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 doing so can create issues and errors.

301 Redirection

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

Maybe when you started out, your site used the default WordPress permalinks and now you would like to improve your site’s SEO. Maybe your website or blog was originally set up to display post dates in your URLs and now all of your posts are perceived as being out-of-date and you want to remove the date tags of your permalinks.

The best way to change your permalinks without impacting your site’s SEO or rankings in a negative way is to use ‘301 redirections’ to reassign links set up using the old permalink structure to web addresses using 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 effective and search engine friendly way to redirect visitors to new site destinations and avoid ‘404’ (Page not found) errors when clicking on an old link.

To create an effective syntax change and avoid damaging your search rankings, sending visitors to broken links, etc. you should install and set up a redirection system before changing the permalink structure of your site.

You can WP site using redirection plugins 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 link redirections using a WordPress redirection plugin or get professional help)

Congratulations! Now you know about the built-in system WordPress uses to display SEO-friendly URLs for your posts and improve your search results. To learn more about using Permalinks, see the official WordPress documentation below:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

***