Wouldn’t it be great if you could add content to your site, and the following would then happen … all from your page URL:

• Site visitors could quickly understand what the page was about,
• Google would be able to discover your posts faster,
• Every piece of content you create 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

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 URL that others will use to link to posts or sections of your site or the links you send in an email pointing readers to posts on your site. Permalinks are often called “pretty” URLs.

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

Why Do You Need To Use Permalinks?

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

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

If you focus on the SEO aspect of your website, then you should not ignore the importance of your URLs. Search engines like Google tend to pay special attention to the structure of URLs when indexing its content.

Permalinks can be 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 it’s best to use permalinks when publishing content in WordPress.

Typically, a default WordPress installation uses a non-search engine friendly URL-naming structure for your posts that looks like this …

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

As you can see from the screenshot below, many WordPress users are still using default permalink settings when publishing their content …

Although Google is clearly still indexing the above sites, they are potentially missing out on additional SEO benefits.

To get the best SEO benefit from 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 characters.

WordPress allows you to create a custom URL structure for your published and archived posts, so your pages can go from something that is non-SEO friendly like this …

To this …

In this tutorial, you will learn how to set up your WordPress permalinks to display your posts with search engine-friendly URLs instead of the default linking structure and help every new post you add automatically get better indexing in search engines like Google.

How To Set Up WordPress Permalinks

From your WordPress administration menu, select Settings > Permalinks …

This brings you to 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 need to specify a different Permalink structure than the one set by 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/cruise-travel/romantic-european-river-cruises

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=1095

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

Adding Pretty URL Tags In Custom Structure

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

• %year% – The year your post is published, displayed as four digits (e.g. ‘2018’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘11’)
• %day% – The day the post is published (e.g. ‘21’)
• %hour% – The hour the post is published (e.g. ‘20’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘10’)
• %second% – The exact second the post is published (e.g. ‘29’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘5097’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of your post title. For example, if the post title is ”Ten Signs That You’re About To Get Fired From Your Job!”, the postname tag will convert this into “ten-signs-that-youre-about-to-get-fired-from-your-job” (all lower case letters and removed exclamation symbols) in the URL. Tip: You can edit the URL wording 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 the ‘Custom Structure’ setting.

Optional Permalink Settings

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

This changes the ‘base’ tag or category of your URLs using the following structure:

• domain.com/category_base/category_name
• domain.com/tag_base/tag_name

For example, changing your category base to “recipes” would display your category links as ‘http://domain.com/recipes/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 optional settings fields blank the defaults will be used.

Remember to save your changes when 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 – Additional Notes

Use Descriptive Categories

To get the maximum 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 points to keep in mind if you are wondering whether or not to add categories to your permalink structure:

• 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 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 ideal permalink structure to use. Use the permalink structure that you think will suit your site best. Your post URLs should be short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We provide more information about WordPress categories in other articles.

Create Timeless Posts

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

(Avoid setting up URL structures that date your posts)

People 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.

What About Changing Permalinks In Blogs With Indexed Content?

Normally, your permalinks should be configured 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 many 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 loss of traffic.

Use 301 Redirects

As you’ve seen in the above screenshots of actual search results, some WordPress site owners (or whoever set up their site) seem to be unaware of the permalinks feature of WordPress.

Maybe when you started out, your site used the default WordPress URL structure and now you would like to improve your site’s SEO. Perhaps your website was configured to display post dates in your web address and now all of your content is showing as being two or three years old and you want to remove the date portion of your permalinks.

The best way to edit your URL structure without negatively impacting your site’s SEO is to add ‘301 redirections’ to point all links set up using the old permalink structure to destinations using the new permalink syntax.

Search engines interpret a ’301′ code as a link that has permanently been relocated to another address. 301 redirects are the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect visitors to new website destinations and avoid ‘404’ (Page not found) errors if they click on an old link.

To create an effective permalink structure change and avoid SEO problems, sending visitors to error pages, etc. you will need to add a redirection system before messing with the permalink structure of your site.

You can WP site using a redirection 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 link redirections using plugins or get professional assistance)

Congratulations! Now you know how to set up your WordPress site to display SEO-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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