Wouldn’t it be great if you could publish a new post on your website, and the following happened … all from your page URL:

• Potential visitors to your site could quickly tell what the post is about,
• Search engines would easily discover your pages and correctly classify their content for better search rankings,
• Each content item you create on your website would have a unique identifier, making things easier to manage.

Well, with WordPress permalinks this can easily be done!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalink – What Is It?

A permalink is the permanent URL to your individual posts, categories and other taxonomies (a way to group things together) like archives.

A permalink is the URL that visitors and search engines will use to link to your posts or sections of your site or the links you send in emails pointing readers to content items on your site. Permalinks are often called “pretty” URLs.

Permalinks make the URLs to each post on your site permanent, hence a perma-link.

Why Do You Need To Use Permalinks?

As you probably know, WordPress is one of the best CMS applications available when it comes to SEO.

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

If you focus on the SEO aspect of your website, then you should not ignore the importance of its URLs. Search engines like Google tend to give special significance to the URL structure of your site.

Permalinks can be used to make the links on your site into memorable and more “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 why you may need to use permalinks in WordPress.

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

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

As the screenshot image below shows, many WordPress site owners are still using out of the box settings when publishing their content …

Although Google is clearly still indexing the above sites, the owners of these sites are missing out on extra SEO benefits.

To get more SEO benefit out of using WordPress and improve your site’s traffic results, you will want to make sure to set up your permalinks structure to make it more search engine-friendly by displaying relevant keywords in your URL, instead of meaningless characters.

WordPress gives you the ability to create a custom URL structure for your published posts, so your pages can easily go from this …

To something with an SEO-friendly URL like 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 display your posts with SEO-friendly URLs.

Configuring WordPress Permalinks

From your WordPress administration menu, select 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 a “pretty” permalink instead for our posts. To do this, we will 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 …

(Configure 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/romantic-cruise-holiday-deals

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=9728

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

Search Engine-Friendly Tags

“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. ‘2016’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘07’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘13’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘17’)
• %minute% – The minute your post is published (e.g. ‘22’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘15’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘8150’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of the 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 letters and no punctuation symbols) in the URL. Tip: You can always edit this 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 sanitized 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’.

Optional Permalink Settings

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

This changes 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, using “topics” as your category base would display your category links as ‘http://domain.com/topics/category_name/’.

So, if you add the following to your permalinks Optional > Category base settings section …

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

To this …

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

Remember to save your changes when you are done …

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 – Tips

Use Descriptive Categories

To get the greatest benefit out of using Permalinks, you will need to set up your WordPress Categories correctly. If you do not have any categories set up, WordPress will use the default category (uncategorized).

According to WordPress SEO expert and author of the WordPress SEO plugin Joost de Valk, here are some points to keep in mind if you are wondering whether or not to add categories to your permalinks:

• If your category name 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 or share and decrease the SEO benefit.
• If you plan to post content under multiple categories, then it’s recommended that you do not use the category tag in your permalink structure.

Despite being the subject of intense debate in WordPress SEO circles, when it comes to category vs no category there is no perfect permalink structure to use. Use the permalink structure you think will suit your site best. Your web address should be short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We cover WordPress categories in another tutorial.

Don’t Use Date Permalinks

Another great tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your aim is to run a news site or there is a special reason why you need to date your site’s content, it’s best to avoid using date-based permalinks when setting up your URLs.

(Avoid setting up permalinks that time-stamp your content)

People are less likely to click on a post that is several years old, even if the content is relevant to what they are searching for.

Changing Your Permalink Structure In Blog With Published Content

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

If your site 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 absolutely something that needs doing, as making changes to permalinks after your site has already been up and running for a while can create SEO issues and errors.

301 Redirects

As you’ve seen in earlier screenshots, some WordPress users (or their web developers) 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 would like to optimize your site better for search engines. Perhaps your website or blog was configured to display post dates in your web address and now all of your content is perceived as being out-of-date and you want to remove the date portion of the permalinks.

To edit your URL structure without impacting your site’s SEO in a negative way you will need to use ‘301 redirections’ to reassign all links that were set up using the old permalinks structure to destinations using the new permalink syntax.

Search engines interpret a ’301′ code as a link that has permanently relocated to another address. 301 redirection is the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect users to new web page destinations and avoid running into page errors when following an old link.

To create an effective syntax change and avoid damaging your search rankings, sending visitors to broken links, etc. you will need to install and set up your redirection system before changing the permalink structure of your site.

You can site or blog using a redirection plugin like Simple 301 Redirects, or Redirection, or use the services of a professional to assist you with setting up and redirecting your permalinks correctly to avoid problems and troubleshoot any errors.

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

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

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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