Wouldn’t it be great if after adding content to your WordPress website or blog, the following took place … all from your web address:

• Visitors could quickly determine what your page was about,
• Search engines could easily discover your page and correctly index your content to improve your search results,
• Every content item published on your website or blog would have a unique identifier, making things easier to manage.

Well, this is what a permalink lets you do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalink – What Is It?

A permalink is the permanent URL to an individual WordPress post, category, or other taxonomy (a way to group things together) like archives.

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

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

Why Do You Need To Use Permalinks?

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

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

If you focus on the SEO aspect of your website, then you should not ignore the importance of your URLs. Google places considerable weight on the URL structure of your site.

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

Now … let’s review the reason why you may need to configure your permalinks in WordPress.

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

WordPress uses the link structure with a string query shown above to locate information within your database. It does not mean anything to either search engines or visitors, and it doesn’t help your website with on-site search engine optimization.

As you can see from the image below taken directly from Google search results, many WordPress site owners haven’t configured their sites to publish search optimized content online …

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 should set up your permalinks structure to make it more search engine-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 posts, so your pages can go from something that is non-SEO friendly like this …

To something like this …

In this tutorial, you will learn how to configure the Permalinks section of your WordPress site to display your posts with search engine-friendly URLs instead of the out-of-the-box linking structure and help every new post you publish get better indexing results in search engines.

Configuring Your WordPress Permalinks

From your WP administration menu, 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 search engine friendly URLs instead for our posts. To do this, we will need to specify a different Permalink structure than the one set by default.

Common Settings

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 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=2867

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

How To Create 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, displayed as four digits (e.g. ‘2017’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘04’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘05’)
• %hour% – The hour the post gets published (e.g. ‘20’)
• %minute% – The minute the post is published (e.g. ‘51’)
• %second% – The exact second the post gets published (e.g. ‘02’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘2357’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted version of your post title. For example, if the post title is ”It Ain’t Worth Doin’ No More!”, the postname tag will convert this into “it-aint-worth-doin-no-more” (all letters converted to lower case and exclamation symbols removed) 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 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 adding the /%postname%/ tag.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

If you need to configure custom structures for your category and tag archive pages you can do this in this section.

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

• 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 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 fields blank the default settings will be used.

Remember to save any 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 – Tips

Categories

To get the most benefit from 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 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 is short and descriptive (e.g. adds a relevant keyword or keyword phrase to your URL), 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 share or copy and decrease the SEO benefit.
• Do you plan to post content under only one category or multiple categories? 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 a 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 cover WordPress categories in another article.

Create Timeless Posts

Another useful tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your site is a news blog or you have any special reason to add dates to your post URLs, avoid choosing date-based permalink options when configuring your blog’s URLs.

(Avoid using permalinks that date your posts)

Visitors are less likely to click on a post if it is several years old, even if the content is relevant to the answers they are searching for.

Changing Your Permalink Structure In An Established Site

Normally, it’s best to set up your permalinks when you first install WordPress. This should be part of your website planning process.

If your website is already established or your site already has a lot of posts indexed in the search engines and you would like to change the permalink structure, make sure that this is really necessary, as doing so can create issues and errors.

Add 301 Redirects

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

Maybe when you started, your site used the default WordPress permalinks and now you would like to improve your SEO. Maybe your site was originally set up to display post dates in your web address and now all of your content is showing as being old and you want to delete the date portion of your URLs.

To modify your permalink structure without negatively affecting your site’s SEO or existing rankings you should add ‘301 redirects’ to reassign all links set up using the previous URL structure to web URLs that use the new structure.

Search engines interpret a ’301′ code 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 web page destinations and avoid page errors when clicking on an old link.

To effectively change your permalink structure and avoid damaging your rankings, sending visitors to broken links, etc. you should install and set up your redirection system before messing with the permalink structure of your site.

You can WP site 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 issues and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up a 301 redirection system for your changed URLs using redirection plugins or use the services of a professional)

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

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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