Wouldn’t it be great if you could just publish content on your WordPress website, and the following would then happen … all from your web address:

• Site visitors could easily understand what your page was about,
• Google would be able to discover your pages faster,
• Each item of content on your site would have its own unique ID, making things easier to manage.

Well, with WordPress permalinks this can easily be done!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – Definition

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

A permalink is the URL that other people will use to link to posts or sections of your site or the links you send in emails pointing to content items on your site. Permalinks are often referred to as “pretty” URLs.

Permalinks make the URLs to each post on your website permanent, hence a permalink.

Permalinks – Why Use Them?

As you are probably aware, 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 further finetuned using excellent SEO plugins.

If you are looking to optimize the SEO aspect of your site or blog, then you cannot ignore the importance of your site’s URLs. Search engines like Google tend to give special significance to the structure of a site’s URLs when indexing its content.

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 take a look at why you may need to configure your permalinks when publishing content in WordPress.

By default, a WordPress installation uses a URL-naming 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 information inside its database. It doesn’t really mean much to anyone, and it doesn’t help your site with on-site SEO.

As you can see from the screenshot below taken directly from Google search results, many WordPress users haven’t yet configured their sites to publish search optimized content …

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

To get more SEO benefit out of using WordPress and improve your site’s rankings, 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 offers you the ability to create a custom URL structure for your published posts, so your content can go from this …

To something with an SEO-friendly URL like this …

Out of the box, WordPress post URLs are not very search engine-friendly. This tutorial explains how to configure your permalinks in WordPress to help your content rank better in search engines.

Changing WordPress Permalinks

Log into your WP admin section and select Settings > Permalinks …

This brings 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 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 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/budget-travel/how-to-save-money-on-cruise-travel

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=9032

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

Creating Pretty WordPress URLs

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

• %year% – The year of the post, four digits (e.g. ‘2018’)
• %monthnum% – The month the post gets published (e.g. ‘05’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘18’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘10’)
• %minute% – The minute your post gets published (e.g. ‘06’)
• %second% – The exact second the post gets published (e.g. ‘28’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘7667’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of the post title. For example, if your post title is ”It Ain’t Worth Doin’ No More!”, the postname tag will convert this into “it-aint-worth-doin-no-more” (all lower case letters and no punctuation marks) in the URL. Tip: You can always edit the URL 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 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 the ‘Custom Structure’ option.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

This section lets you configure custom structures for your tag and category archive page URLs.

This changes 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, using “topics” as your category base would make your category links display as ‘http://domain.com/topics/category_name/’.

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

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

To this …

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

Remember to save any changes when 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 – Tips

Use Descriptive Categories

To get the maximum SEO benefit out of 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 some points to consider 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.
• 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. Use the permalink structure 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 provide more information about WordPress categories in another tutorial.

Don’t Use Date Permalinks

Another tip from Joost de Valk is that unless you plan to run a news site or there is a special reason why you need to create dated website addresses, avoid selecting date-based permalink syntax for your blog’s URLs.

(Avoid using permalinks that date your content)

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

What About Sites With Indexed Content?

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

If your site has been running for a while or your site already has many posts indexed in the search engines and you want to change the permalink structure, make sure that this is absolutely necessary, as making changes to permalinks after your site has already been going for a while can create issues and loss of traffic.

Use 301 Redirection

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

Maybe when you started out, your site used the default WordPress URL structure 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 out-of-date and you want to delete the date tags in the permalinks.

To edit your URL structure without affecting your site’s SEO or existing rankings in a negative way you should use ‘301 redirects’ to reassign links using the previous permalinks structure to destinations using the new structure.

A ’301′ code is interpreted by search engines as a link that has permanently been moved to another destination. 301 redirection is the most efficient and search engine friendly way to redirect users to new website destinations and avoid ‘404’ (Page not found) errors when following an old link.

To effectively change your permalink syntax and avoid SEO problems, sending visitors to error pages, etc. you will need to add a redirection system before changing the permalink structure of your site.

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

(Set up URL redirections using plugins or use the services of a professional)

Congratulations! Now you know how to configure your WordPress site to display SEO-friendly URLs for your posts. To learn more about using Permalinks, refer to the WordPress codex here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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