Wouldn’t it be great if after publishing content on your website or blog, the following took place … all from your post URL:

• Site visitors could easily tell what the page was about,
• Search engines would be able to easily find your pages and correctly classify their content for better search rankings,
• Every piece of content you create on 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

Permalink – What Is It?

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

A permalink is the URL that people and search engines use to link to articles or sections of your site or the links you send in an email pointing to articles on your site. Permalinks are often called “pretty” URLs.

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

Permalinks – Why Do We Need To Use Them?

As you are probably aware, WordPress is one of the best CMS tools available when it comes to publishing search engines optimized content.

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

If you are looking to optimize the SEO aspect of your site or blog, then you should not ignore the importance of your URLs. Search engines like Google place considerable weight on the URL structure of your site.

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

Now … let’s take a look at the reason why you may need to configure your permalinks if publishing content in WordPress.

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

The above link structure is used by WordPress to locate information within your database. It doesn’t really mean anything to search engines or visitors, and it doesn’t help your website with on-site search engine optimization.

As the screenshot image from Google search listings below shows, many WordPress site owners are still using default permalink settings when publishing their content …

Although Google is still indexing the above sites, the owners of these sites are missing out on extra 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 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 pages can easily go from something that is non-SEO friendly like this …

To something like this …

In this step-by-step tutorial, you will learn how to configure your WordPress permalinks to display posts using SEO-friendly URLs instead of the out-of-the-box linking structure and help every new post you publish on your site or blog get better indexing results in search engines.

Setting Up Your WordPress Permalinks

Log into your WP admin 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 search engine friendly URLs instead for our posts. To do this, we will need to specify a different Permalink structure than the default.

Permalinks - Common 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/travel-tips/how-to-save-money-on-cruise-travel

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=1547

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

Adding Pretty URL Tags In Custom Structure

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

• %year% – The year your post is published, four digits (e.g. ‘2018’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘07’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘06’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘24’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘01’)
• %second% – The exact second your post is published (e.g. ‘47’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘5258’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of the 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 lower case characters and exclamation marks deleted) in the URL. Tip: You can always edit this 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

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

You can change the ‘base’ category or tag of 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 will display your category links as ‘http://domain.com/topics/uncategorized/’.

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

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

To this …

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

Remember to save your 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 – Additional Notes

Categories

To get greater benefit out of using Permalinks, it’s important 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 expert and author of the WordPress SEO plugin Joost de Valk, here are some points to keep in mind if you are wondering whether or not to add categories to your permalinks:

• If your domain is short and your category name is short and descriptive (e.g. uses a relevant keyword or keyword phrase), 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 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. 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 useful tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your website is a news blog or there is a special reason why you need to create dated post URLs, avoid choosing date-based permalink syntax when configuring your blog’s URLs.

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

Although using URL structures that time-stamp your content is better that using no permalinks at all from an SEO point-of-view, people are less likely to click on posts that are several years old, even if the content is relevant to the answers they are searching for.

What If My Blog Has Content?

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

If your website has been running for a while 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 SEO issues and errors.

301 Redirection

As you’ve seen earlier, some website owners (or whoever set up their site) are completely unaware of the search-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 content is perceived as being outdated and you want to remove the date portion in the permalinks.

The best way to change your permalink structure without affecting your site’s SEO or existing rankings in a negative way is to add ‘301 redirects’ to point links that use the old permalink structure to page URLs using the new permalinks structure.

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

To effectively change your syntax and avoid SEO problems, sending visitors to broken links, etc. you should set up a redirection system before changing the permalink structure of your site.

You can site using a WordPress 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 problems and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up link redirections using 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 WordPress codex below:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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