Wouldn’t it be great if you could just add a new page to your WordPress website or blog, and the following took place … all from your page address:

• Users could quickly glean what your content was about,
• Search engines would be able to easily discover your pages and correctly classify their content for better search results,
• Every content item published on your website would have its own unique identifier, making things easier to manage.

Well, this is what permalinks let you do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalink – What Is It?

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

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

Permalinks make the web address pointing to each post on your website permanent, hence a permalink.

Why Use Permalinks?

Hopefully, by now you are probably aware that, WordPress is one of the best CMS applications you can use when it comes to SEO.

WordPress is not only well optimized right out of the box, but the SEO aspect can be easily fine tuned with SEO plugins.

If you focus on the SEO aspect of your site, then you should not 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 pages.

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

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

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

WordPress uses the above link structure to find information within your database. It does not mean much to anyone, and it doesn’t help your website with on-site SEO.

As the screenshot taken from Google search results below shows, many site owners haven’t yet configured their sites to use WordPress permalinks …

Although these sites are getting their content indexed on search engines, they are potentially missing out on extra SEO benefits.

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

To this …

By default, WordPress post URLs are not very SEO-friendly. This step-by-step tutorial shows you how to configure the Permalinks section of your WordPress site to display your posts using SEO-friendly URLs.

Changing Your WordPress Permalinks

In your WordPress admin 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 “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 …

(Change 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-europe/how-to-save-money-on-cruise-travel

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=8614

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

Adding Search Engine-Friendly Tags In WordPress

“Pretty” permalinks, 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% – The month the post is published (e.g. ‘08’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘12’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘03’)
• %minute% – The minute the post is published (e.g. ‘12’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘50’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘7008’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted version of the post title. For example, if the post title is ”Ten Best Hotels In Cote D’Azur!”, the postname tag will convert this into “ten-best-hotels-in-cote-dazur” (all lower case letters and punctuation marks deleted) in the URL. Tip: You can 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 ‘Custom Structure’.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

If you need to configure custom permalinks for your category and tag 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, changing your category base to “news” would display your category links as ‘http://domain.com/news/category_name/’.

So, if you add the following to your permalinks Optional > Category base settings field …

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

To this …

If you leave the fields blank the default settings will be used.

Remember to save any 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 Info

Use Short, Descriptive Categories

To get the optimal benefit from 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 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 category name is short and descriptive (e.g. adds a relevant keyword or keyword phrase to your URL), you may want to add the category tag to 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 and reduce the SEO benefit.
• If you are going to post content under multiple categories, then it’s recommended that you do not use the category tag in your permalink structure.

Ultimately, when it comes to category vs no category there is no ”better” permalink structure to use. We recommend choosing the permalink structure you think will suit your site best and that will make your post URLs short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We cover WordPress categories in another tutorial.

Don’t Use Date Permalinks

Another tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your site provides news, or there is a special reason why you need to create dated post URLs, avoid choosing date-based permalink options for your URLs.

(Avoid using URL structures that date your posts)

Visitors are less likely to click on posts that are several years old, even if the content is relevant to what they are searching for.

What About Established Sites?

Normally, it’s best to set up your permalinks when you install a new WordPress site. This should be part of your site 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 something that absolutely needs doing, as doing so can create SEO issues and errors.

301 Redirects

As you’ve seen earlier, some WordPress users (or whoever set up their site) are completely unaware of the permalinks feature of WordPress.

Maybe you started out using the default WordPress permalinks and now you want to improve your SEO. Maybe your website or blog was configured to display post dates in your web address and now all of your posts are showing as being old and you want to remove the date portion of the permalinks.

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

A ’301′ code is interpreted by search engines 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 running into ”page not found” errors when they click on an old link.

To effectively change your permalink structure and avoid damaging your search rankings, sending visitors to broken links, etc. you will need to configure a redirection system before changing the permalink structure of your site.

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

(Set up link redirections using a WP redirection plugin or use the services of a professional)

Congratulations! Now you know how to set up your site’s permalinks to display SEO-friendly URLs for your posts and improve your search search rankings. To learn more about using Permalinks, see the official WordPress documentation here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

***