Wouldn’t it be great if after adding content to your website or blog, the following could happen … just from your post address:

• Visitors could easily determine what your content was about,
• Google could easily find your posts and correctly index their content to improve your search results,
• Every single item of content published on your website would have its own unique identifier, 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 your individual WordPress posts, categories and other taxonomies (a way to organize things together) like archives.

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

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

Permalinks – Why Use Them?

As you are probably aware, WordPress is one of the best Content Management Systems you can use when it comes to SEO.

WordPress is not only great for SEO out of the box, but there are excellent SEO plugins you can use that can easily help to finetune its SEO aspect.

If you are looking to optimize the SEO aspect of your site or blog, then you should not ignore the importance of your URLs. Google places considerable weight on the URL structure of a site.

Permalinks are 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 take a look at the reason why you should configure your permalinks if publishing content in WordPress.

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

The link structure shown above is used by WordPress to find data inside your database. It doesn’t really mean much to anyone, and it doesn’t help your website with on-site SEO.

As the screenshot image below shows, many WordPress users haven’t yet set up their permalinks …

Although Google is clearly still indexing the above sites, they are potentially missing out on additional SEO benefits.

To get greater SEO benefit from using WordPress and improve your site’s rankings, you should configure your permalinks structure to make it more SEO-friendly by displaying relevant keywords in your URL, instead of meaningless numbers and symbols.

WordPress lets you create a custom URL structure for your published and archived posts, so your pages can go from this …

To this …

In this tutorial, you will learn how to set up your WordPress permalinks to display your posts with search engine-friendly URLs instead of the out-of-the-box URL structure and help every new post you publish get better indexing results in search engines like Google.

Setting Up WordPress Permalinks

In your WordPress dashboard 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

In the Common Settings section, select Custom Structure, then add one or more ‘tags’ (see below) to create SEO-friendly URLs …

(Configure 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/travel-tips/three-favourite-european-river-cruise-destinations

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=1593

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

Search Engine-Friendly Tags

“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% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘09’)
• %day% – The day your post gets published (e.g. ‘11’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘05’)
• %minute% – The minute your post gets published (e.g. ‘53’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘55’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘2856’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted 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 characters converted to lower case and exclamation symbols removed) in the URL. Tip: You can always edit the URL wording 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 adding the /%postname%/ tag in the ‘Custom Structure’ setting.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

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

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

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

For example, using “news” as your category base will display your category links as ‘http://domain.com/news/category_name/’.

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

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

To something like this …

If you leave the optional settings fields blank WordPress uses the defaults.

Remember to save your changes after you have finished …

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 more SEO 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 keep in mind if you are wondering whether you should add categories to your permalinks or not:

• If your domain is short and your category slug is short and descriptive (e.g. uses a relevant keyword or keyword phrase), 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 copy or share and reduce the SEO benefit.
• Do you plan to post content under only one category or multiple categories? If you plan 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 using category vs no category there is no ”better” permalink structure to use. We recommend choosing the permalink structure you think will suit your needs best and that will make your post URLs short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We cover WordPress categories in other tutorials.

Avoid Using Date-Based Permalink Syntax

Another tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your website provides news, or there is a special reason why you need to add dates to your URLs, it’s best to avoid using date-based permalinks when configuring your URLs.

(Avoid using permalinks that date your content)

People 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.

Changing The Permalink Structure In An Established Blog

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

If your site is already established or your site already has a lot of content indexed in the search engines and you would like to change the permalink structure, make sure that this is really something that needs doing, as changing permalinks after your site has been up and running for a while could create issues and errors.

301 Redirects

As you’ve seen earlier, some website owners (or their web developers) are completely unaware of the SEO-friendly URLs feature of WordPress.

Maybe you started out using the default WordPress permalinks and now you want to optimize your site better for search engines. Maybe your website was originally set up to display post dates in your URLs and now all of your content is perceived as being out-of-date and you want to delete the date portion of your URLs.

To edit your permalinks without impacting your site’s SEO in a negative way you will need to add ‘301 redirections’ to point all links that use the old permalinks structure to page URLs using the new permalink syntax.

A ’301′ code is interpreted by search engines as a link that has permanently relocated to another destination. 301 redirection is the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect visitors to new web page destinations and avoid running into page errors if following an old link.

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

You can add a link redirection system to your site using plugins like Simple 301 Redirects, or Redirection, or get a professional to assist you with setting up and redirecting your permalinks correctly to avoid problems and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up a 301 redirection system using a WordPress plugin or use the services of a professional)

Congratulations! Now you know about the built-in system WordPress uses 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

***