What are permalinks in SEO?
Permalinks are what WordPress calls URLs that are search engine friendly and human-readable. The naming of Permalink is a bit misleading because it actually refers to a URL and not a link, so it probably should have been called PermaURL.
Before there were content management systems (CMS) most web pages were hand coded and saved as individual HTML files. This meant every URL corresponded to an actual HTML file on the server.
A CMS uses a database to store all the content for a page and a single template file to display the content based on the page that is being requested. If you have a website with 100 blog posts then there is still only one template file used to display the 100 blog posts.
Each of those blog posts exists on a virtual URL, or sometimes called a dynamic URL. You can identify virtual URLs because they usually have a question mark (?) and an ID number after it. An example of a virtual URL might be:
https://example.com/?id=2032When a user visits this URL, the CMS knows that it needs to display the content in the database which has the ID of 2032. The CMS then displays that content using the template file.
WordPress gives website owners the ability to change this dynamic URL to a permalink. So instead of using the content ID number, the page title could be used, so the dynamic URL above becomes:
https://example.com/how-permalinks-workThis page still doesn’t physically exist on the server, so it is still a virtual URL, but it looks a lot nicer for humans to understand what the page might be about before they visit it and it can contain keywords in the URL which are ranking signals for Google.
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