What are permalinks?
Permalinks are how your website URL looks in the top address bar. It’s that simple. Unfortunately the default permalink for a WordPress website is not good. Well it’s not that bad but it is not highly Search Engine Optimized. For example if you left your permalinks at the default setting they would look something like this www.wordpress-websitebuilder/ p=142 but after changing the permalink settings to show the postname in the URL then it would look like this www.wordpress-websitebuilder/make-wordpress-permalinks-into-search-engine-friendly urls
As you can see, now the search engines can register that there are words in the url and match this with the title of the page, and the keywords in the actual post.
How to customize your WordPress permalinks and make SEO URL’s?
- Sign into your WordPress website dashboard.
- Click on the Settings link in the left menu.
- Choose permalinks from the menu.
- Click on the custom option.
- Type in /%postname%/
- Press SAVE.
You can choose to use the date, year, or any other combination that you prefer.
Watch the video below for more information.
Now there are many options for Permalink settings and I am just going to list a few examples. You will only need to use custom permalinks like the ones below if you are moving a website into WordPress. If you are building a new WordPress website then I would simply use /%postname%/ for my Permalink.
Permalink and URL Result
/%post_id%-%postname%/
http://www.yourdomain.com/123-the-post-title/
/blog/%postname%/
http://www.yourdomain.com/blog/the-post-title/
/%postname%/ (This is the one I use)
http://www.yourdomain.com/the-post-title/
/%category%/%postname%/
http://www.yourdomain.com/category/the-post-title/
/%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%/
http://www.yourdomain.com/2011/12/the-post-title/
/%category%/%postname.html (Adds .html to the end of the url)
http://www.yourdomain.com/category/the-post-title.html
/%postname%.htm (Adds .htm to the end of the url)
http://www.yourdomain.com/the-post-title.htm
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mitz – who has written 186 posts on Wordpress Website builder.
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{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Awesome and informative post Mitz. Thank you for this and I will surely try this now. As newbie in this field, you gave me a great help in improving my work. More power and looking forward to more posts from you. Kudos.
The issue that i have is that I am using pages (not posts) and i needed to create a search engine friendly URL. Should i have been using posts?
We have all of our pages for our product.
How do I get the page name as part of the URL so I can make my site have the same type of URL’s.
Does postname return the title of any article whether it is a page or a post? I am new to wordpress so be kink.
eric recently posted..Hello world!
Hi there Eric
The pages on my Wordpress websites are all url friendly. For eg. they have http://domainname.com/page name
But just remember if you are changing the permalinks on a website that has already been indexed in Google, then you will be changing the urls…It will take a few weeks for google to pick them up again.