Wouldn’t it be great if after adding new content to your website, the following could happen … all from your post address:

• Potential site visitors could easily tell what your page was about,
• Search engines would easily discover your post and correctly classify your content to improve your search results,
• Every single piece of content you create on your website would have its own unique identifier, making things easier to manage.

Well, this is what a WordPress permalink lets you do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalink – What Is It?

A permalink is the permanent URL to an individual WordPress post, category, or other taxonomy (a way to organize things together) like archives.

A permalink is the web address that others will use to link to posts or sections of your site or the links you send in emails pointing readers to content items on your blog. 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, you probably know that, WordPress is one of the best Content Management Systems available when it comes to SEO.

WordPress is not only great for SEO out of the box, but there are SEO plugins you can install that will help to fine tuned its SEO aspect.

If you are looking to optimize the SEO aspect of your site or blog, then you cannot ignore the importance of your site’s URLs. Google tends to give special consideration to the structure of URLs when indexing pages.

Permalinks can be used to make the links on your site into “prettier” and more “search engine friendly” URLs. Permalinks also improve the aesthetics, usability, and forward-compatibility of your links.

Now … let’s review why it’s best to configure your permalinks in WordPress.

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

The above link structure is used by WordPress to locate information within your database. It does not help your site with on-site search engine optimization.

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

Although Google is clearly still indexing the above sites, many site owners are potentially missing out on extra SEO benefits.

To get more SEO benefit out of using and improve your site’s rankings, you should configure your permalinks structure to make it more search engine-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 and archived posts, so your content can easily go from something that is non-SEO friendly like this …

To something with an SEO-friendly URL like this …

Out of the box, WordPress post URLs are not very SEO-friendly. This step-by-step tutorial shows you how to set up the Permalinks section of your WordPress site to automatically help your content get better indexing results in Google.

Setting Up Your WordPress Permalinks

Log into your WordPress admin and click on Settings > Permalinks …

This will bring 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 “pretty” permalinks instead for our posts. To do this, we need to specify a different Permalink structure than the one set by default.

Common Settings

In the Common Settings section, select Custom Structure, then add one or more ‘tags’ (see below) to create search engine-friendly URLs …

(Change 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/cruise-travel/cruise-holiday-deals

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=7965

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

Adding SEO-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. ‘2018’)
• %monthnum% – The month your post is published (e.g. ‘01’)
• %day% – The day the post gets published (e.g. ‘17’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘20’)
• %minute% – The minute the post is published (e.g. ‘21’)
• %second% – The exact second the post gets published (e.g. ‘14’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘8055’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted version of your post title. For example, if your post title is ”The Five Don’ts Of DIY Home Repair!”, the postname tag will convert this into “the-five-donts-of-diy-home-repair” (all letters converted to lower case and removed exclamation symbols) in the URL. Tip: You can edit the URL text 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 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 selecting the ‘Custom Structure’ setting and using the /%postname%/ tag.

Optional Permalink Settings

Here you can configure custom structures for your tag and category archive pages.

You can change the ‘base’ category or tag of 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/uncategorized/’.

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

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

To something like this …

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

Remember to save any 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 Information

Set Up Your Categories

To get the best SEO benefit from using Permalinks, you will need 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 or not to add categories to your permalinks:

• If your category slug 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.
• If you plan 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 ideal permalink structure to use. Use a permalink structure you think will suit your site best. Many SEO experts and webmasters recommend making 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 aim is to run a news blog or you have a special reason to date your content, avoid choosing date-based permalinks when setting up your blog’s URLs.

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

Although setting up permalinks that date your posts may be considered better that using no permalinks at all from an SEO point-of-view, people are less likely to click on a post if it is several years old, even if the content is relevant to what they are searching for.

Changing Permalinks In Site With Published Posts

Normally, your site’s permalinks should be configured when you first install WordPress. This should be part of your site planning process.

If your website or blog 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 something that absolutely needs doing, as making changes to permalinks after your site has already been running for a while could create issues and loss of traffic.

301 Redirection

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 search-friendly URLs feature of WordPress.

Maybe when you started, your site used the default WordPress URL structure and now you want to improve your site’s SEO. Perhaps your website was configured 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 tags of the 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 links using the new permalinks syntax.

A code ‘301’ is interpreted by search engines as a link that has permanently relocated. 301 redirection is the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect visitors to new web page destinations and avoid ”page not found” errors when clicking on an old link.

To create an effective syntax change and avoid damaging your rankings, sending visitors to broken links, etc. you should configure your redirection system before messing with the permalink structure of your site.

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

(Set up 301 redirections using plugins or get professional assistance)

Congratulations! Now you know about the built-in system WordPress uses to display search engine-friendly URLs for your posts. To learn more about using Permalinks, see the official WordPress documentation below:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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