Wouldn’t it be great if after adding a new post to your WordPress website or blog, the following happened … just from your URL:

• Potential visitors could quickly glean what your page is about,
• Search engines would discover your posts faster,
• Each content item added to your website or blog would have a unique ID, making things easier to manage.

Well, this is what a permalink lets you do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – Definition

Permalinks are the permanent URLs to an individual post, category, or other taxonomy (a way to group things together) like archives.

A permalink is the web address that other people use to link to posts or sections of your site or the links you send in an email pointing readers to a particular post on your site. Permalinks are often called “pretty” URLs.

Permalinks make the URL pointing to each post on your website permanent, hence a perma-link.

Permalinks – Why Do You Need To Use Them?

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

WordPress is not only great for SEO out of the box, but its SEO aspect can be further fine tuned using SEO plugins.

If you focus on the SEO aspect of your site, then you should not ignore the importance of its URLs. Search engines like Google tend to give special consideration to 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 are also used to improve the usability, aesthetics, and forward-compatibility of your links.

Now … let’s see the reason why you may need to set up permalinks in WordPress.

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

WordPress uses the link with a string query shown above to find data within its database. It does not help your website with on-site SEO.

As the screenshot from Google search results below shows, many site owners have not configured their permalinks …

Although Google is clearly still indexing the above sites, the owners of these sites are missing out on additional SEO benefits.

To get more SEO benefit from 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 numbers and symbols.

WordPress lets you create a custom URL structure for your published posts, so your content 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 the Permalinks section of your WordPress site to display posts using SEO-friendly URLs instead of the out-of-the-box URL structure and help every new post you add get better indexing results in Google.

How To Change Your WordPress Permalinks

From your WP 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 “pretty” permalinks 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 SEO-friendly URLs …

(Configure 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/how-to-save-money-on-cruise-travel

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=9008

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

Creating Pretty WordPress URLs

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

• %year% – The year the post is published, four digits (e.g. ‘2017’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘02’)
• %day% – The day your post gets published (e.g. ‘26’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘24’)
• %minute% – The minute your post is published (e.g. ‘39’)
• %second% – The exact second your post is published (e.g. ‘20’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘6557’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of the 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 lower case characters and no exclamation symbols) in the URL. Tip: You can always edit the wording in your post titles 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 adding the /%postname%/ tag in ‘Custom Structure’.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

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

This changes 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 would display your category links as ‘http://domain.com/news/uncategorized/’.

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

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

To something like this …

If you leave these fields blank the defaults will be used.

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 – Tips

Use Short, Descriptive Categories

To get the greatest 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 Joost de Valk, here are some things to consider if you are wondering whether you should add categories to your permalink structure 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 copy or share 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.

Ultimately, 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 post URLs short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We provide detailed information about WordPress categories in another article.

Avoid Using URL Syntaxes That Time-Stamp Your Posts

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

(Avoid setting up permalinks that time-stamp 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 the answers they are searching for.

What About Changing Permalinks In An Established Blog?

Normally, it’s best to configure your permalinks when you create a new WordPress site. This should be part of your site planning process.

If your website is already established or you have a lot of content already indexed in the search engines and you want to change the permalink structure, make sure that this is absolutely something that needs doing, as doing so could create issues and errors.

Use 301 Redirects

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

Maybe when you started, your site used the default WordPress URL structure and now you want to optimize your site better for search engines. Perhaps your website was originally set up to display post dates in your URLs and now all of your posts are showing as being two or three years old and you want to delete the date portion of the permalinks.

The best way to edit your permalink structure without affecting your site’s SEO or existing rankings in a negative way is to add ‘301 redirects’ to reassign links that use the previous permalink syntax to web addresses that use the new syntax.

Search engines interpret a code ‘301’ as a link that has permanently moved. 301 redirection is the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect users to new website destinations and avoid ”page not found” errors if they click on an old link.

To create an effective syntax change and avoid SEO problems, sending visitors to error pages, etc. you will need to set up 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 problems and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up URL redirections 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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