Wouldn’t it be great if after publishing new content on your WordPress site, the following happened … just from your post URL:

• Potential visitors could gain an understanding of what the content is about,
• Google would be able to find your pages faster,
• Every content item 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

What Are Permalinks?

Permalinks are the permanent URLs to your individual WordPress posts, categories and other taxonomies (a way to group things together) like archives.

A permalink is the web address that people and search engines use to link to posts or sections of your site or the links you send in an email pointing readers to your posts. Permalinks are sometimes referred to as “pretty” URLs.

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

Permalinks – Why Use Them?

Hopefully, you probably know by now that, WordPress is one of the best CMS tools available when it comes to publishing search optimized content.

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

If you are looking to optimize the SEO aspect of your site, then you should not ignore the importance of its site’s URLs. Search engines like Google tend to give special consideration to the URL structure of a site.

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

Now … let’s take a look at 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 with a string query to find data inside your database. It does not mean much to anyone, and it doesn’t help your website with on-site search engine optimization.

As the screenshot image taken from Google search results below shows, many WordPress users haven’t set up their permalinks …

Although these sites are still getting their content indexed on search engines, the owners of these sites are missing out on extra SEO benefits.

To get the best possible SEO benefit from using and improve your site’s rankings, you should set up your permalinks structure to make it more SEO-friendly by displaying relevant keywords in your URL, instead of meaningless characters.

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

To this …

By default, WordPress URLs are not very SEO-friendly. This tutorial explains how to configure your WordPress permalinks to help your content rank better in Google.

Configuring Your WordPress Permalinks

In your WordPress admin section click on, 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 a “pretty” permalink instead for our posts. To do this, we will need to specify a different Permalink structure than the default one.

Common Permalink Settings

In the Common Settings section, select Custom Structure, then add one or more ‘tags’ (see below) to create search engine-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/cruise-travel/romantic-cruise-holiday-deals

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=7418

(Using permalinks helps visitors understand what the post is about)

Pretty URL Tags

“Pretty” URLs, or search engine-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% – The month the post gets published (e.g. ‘03’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘05’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘13’)
• %minute% – The minute the post is published (e.g. ‘23’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘06’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘9006’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted version of your post title. For example, if the post title is “Top Five Budget Travel Tips!”, the postname tag will convert this into “top-five-budget-travel-tips” (all characters converted to lower case and punctuation marks 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 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 ‘Custom Structure’.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

In this section, you can enter custom structures for your category and tag archive page URLs.

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, changing your category base to “travel” will display your category links as ‘http://domain.com/travel/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 looking like this …

To something like this …

If you leave the fields blank WordPress uses the default settings.

Remember to save your changes after you are 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 Notes

Use Descriptive Categories

To get the best SEO benefit out of 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 or not to add categories to your permalink structure:

• If your category slug 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.
• 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 using category vs no category there is no perfect permalink structure to use. Use a permalink structure that you think will suit your needs best. Your web addresses should be short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We provide more information about WordPress categories in another tutorial.

Avoid Setting Up URL Syntaxes That Time-Stamp Your Posts

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

(Avoid setting up URL structures that time-stamp your posts)

Although using URL structures that date your posts may be considered better that using no permalinks at all from an SEO aspect, visitors 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.

What About Changing Permalinks In Established Blogs?

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 website 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 absolutely necessary, as making changes to permalinks after your site has already been running for a while can create issues and loss of traffic.

301 Redirects

As you’ve seen in earlier screenshots, some WordPress users (or whoever set up their site) seem to be unaware of the SEO-friendly URLs feature of WordPress.

Maybe you started out using the default WordPress URL structure and now you want to optimize your site better for search engines. Maybe your site was configured to display post dates in your URLs and now all of your posts are showing as being 2-3 years old and you want to remove the date tags of your permalinks.

The best way to change your permalink structure without negatively affecting your site’s SEO is to add ‘301 redirects’ to reassign links using the old URL syntax to web addresses that use the new syntax.

A ’301′ code is interpreted by search engines as a link that has been permanently moved elsewhere. 301 redirects are the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect users to new website destinations and avoid running into page errors if they click on an old link.

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

You can site or blog using a WP plugin like Simple 301 Redirects, or Redirection, or get a professional to help you set up and redirect your permalinks correctly to avoid any problems and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up 301 redirections using plugins or use the services of a professional)

Congratulations! Now you know how to configure your WordPress site or blog to display SEO-friendly URLs for your posts and improve your search search rankings. For additional information on using Permalinks, refer to the official WordPress documentation here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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