Wouldn’t it be great if after publishing content on your WordPress website, the following happened … just from your post address:

• Readers could easily glean what your post was about,
• Google would find your pages faster,
• Every content item added to your website would have a unique identifier, making your site easier to manage.

Well, with WordPress permalinks you can easily do this!

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 other people will use to link to posts or sections of your site or the links you send in emails pointing readers to articles on your site. Some people also refer to permalinks as “pretty” URLs.

Permalinks make the web address pointing to each post on your site permanent, hence a permalink.

Permalinks – Why Use Them?

Hopefully, you are probably aware by now that, WordPress is one of the best CMS applications you can use when it comes to publishing search optimized content.

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

If you are looking to optimize the SEO aspect of your site, then you should not ignore the importance of your site’s URLs. Search engines like Google tend to pay special attention to the structure of a site’s 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 usability, aesthetics, and forward-compatibility of your links.

Now … let’s see the reason why you may need to set up permalinks in WordPress.

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

WordPress uses the link structure with a string query shown above to locate information within its database. It does not help your website with on-site search engine optimization.

As the screenshot image taken directly from Google search listings below shows, many site owners have not yet configured their permalinks to publish search optimized content …

Although these sites are still getting their content indexed on search engines, they are potentially missing out on additional SEO benefits.

To get the maximum SEO benefit out of using WordPress and improve your site’s rankings, you should set up your permalinks structure to make it more search engine-friendly by displaying relevant keywords in your URL, instead of meaningless numbers and symbols.

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

To this …

Out of the box, WordPress post URLs are not very search engine-friendly. In this step-by-step tutorial, you will learn how to set up the Permalinks section of your WordPress site to help your content rank better in search engines.

Changing Your WordPress Permalinks

In your WordPress administration section click on, 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 search engine friendly URLs instead for our posts. To do this, we need to specify a different Permalink structure than the default.

Common Permalink Settings

In the Common Settings section, select Custom Structure, then add one or more ‘tags’ (see below) to create SEO-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/budget-cruises/romantic-cruise-holiday-deals

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=8614

(Using post name permalinks helps readers and search engines understand what the content is about)

Search Engine-Friendly Tags

“Pretty” permalinks, 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. ‘2015’)
• %monthnum% – The month the post is published (e.g. ‘10’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘15’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘18’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘36’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘41’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘2976’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted version of your post title. For example, if your 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 punctuation marks removed) in the URL. Tip: You can always edit the words in your post titles 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 ‘Custom Structure’.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

If you need to set up custom permalinks for your tag and category page URLs you can do this in this section.

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, changing your category base to “recipes” will display your category links as ‘http://domain.com/recipes/uncategorized/’.

So, if you make the following change in your permalinks Optional > Category base settings field …

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

To this …

If you leave the optional settings fields blank the defaults will be used.

Remember to save any changes after you have 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 Short, Descriptive Categories

To get the greatest SEO benefit out of using Permalinks, it’s important 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 a few things to keep in mind if you are wondering whether you should add categories to your permalinks or not:

• If your category slug is short and descriptive (e.g. uses a relevant keyword or keyword phrase), 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 copy and reduce 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 using category vs no category there really is no ideal 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 provide detailed information about WordPress categories in another tutorial.

Create Timeless Posts

Another useful tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your goal is to run a news blog or you have any special reason to date your content, it’s best to avoid selecting date-based permalink options when configuring your blog’s URLs.

(Avoid using permalinks that date your posts)

Although using URL structures that date your content may be considered better that using no permalinks at all from an SEO aspect, visitors are less likely to click on a post if it is a couple of years old, even if the content is relevant to the answers they are searching for.

Changing Permalinks In Blog With Published Content

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

If your site has been running for a while or your site already has a lot of content indexed in the search engines and you want to change the permalink structure, make sure that this is something that absolutely needs doing, as doing so could create issues and errors.

301 Redirection

As you’ve seen in earlier screenshots, some site owners (or whoever set up their site) seem to be unaware of the search-friendly URLs feature of WordPress.

Maybe when you started out, your site used the default WordPress URL structure and now you would like to improve your SEO. Perhaps your site was configured to display post dates in your web address and now all of your posts are showing as being old and you want to remove the date portion of the permalinks.

The best way to edit your permalinks without negatively affecting your site’s SEO or rankings is to add ‘301 redirections’ to reassign all links set up using the previous URL syntax to post URLs using the new syntax.

A ’301′ code is interpreted by search engines as a link that has permanently relocated to another address. 301 redirects are the most efficient and search engine friendly way to redirect users to new site destinations and avoid running into ”page not found” errors if following an old link.

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

You can add a link redirection system to your do this 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 a link redirection system using a WP redirection plugin or get professional help)

Congratulations! Now you know how to configure your blog’s permalinks to display search engine-friendly URLs for your posts and improve your search search rankings. For additional information on using Permalinks, refer to the official WordPress documentation here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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