Wouldn’t it be great if you could simply publish a new page on your WordPress website, and the following would then take place … all from your post URL:

• Potential site visitors could quickly gain an understanding of what the content was about,
• Search engines could easily discover your posts and correctly classify their content to improve your search rankings,
• Every single post published on your website or blog would have its own unique identifier, making your site easier to manage.

Well, this is what a permalink lets you do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – Definition

Permalinks are the permanent URLs to an individual post, category, or other taxonomy (a way to group things together) like archives.

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

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

Permalinks – Why Do You Need To Use Them?

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

WordPress is not only well optimized right out of the box, but there are excellent SEO plugins you can install that can easily 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 its URLs. Search engines like Google tend to pay special attention to the URL structure of a site.

Permalinks are used to make the links on your site into “prettier” 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 it’s best to use permalinks when publishing content in WordPress.

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

WordPress uses the link structure shown above to locate information inside your database. It doesn’t really mean much to anyone, and it doesn’t help your site with on-site search engine optimization.

As the screenshot image from Google search listings below shows, many WordPress users haven’t yet configured their permalinks to publish search optimized content online …

Although Google is clearly still indexing the above sites, these site owners 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 characters.

WordPress allows you to create a custom URL structure for your published posts, so your content can go from this …

To this …

In this tutorial, you will learn how to set up your WordPress permalinks to display posts with search engine-friendly URLs instead of the default linking structure and help every new post you publish on your site or blog get better indexing in search engines.

Configuring WordPress Permalinks

Log into your WordPress dashboard section and 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 a “pretty” permalink instead for our posts. To do this, we will need to specify a different Permalink structure than the default.

Common 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 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/travel-deals/how-to-save-money-on-cruise-travel

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=8582

(Using permalinks helps readers understand what the 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 of the post, four digits (e.g. ‘2016’)
• %monthnum% – The month the post gets published (e.g. ‘02’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘16’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘21’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘21’)
• %second% – The exact second your post gets published (e.g. ‘49’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘9101’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted version of the post title. For example, if your post title is ”Ten Best Hotels In Cote D’Azur!”, the postname tag will convert this into “ten-best-hotels-in-cote-dazur” (all lower case letters and punctuation symbols removed) in the URL. Tip: You can always edit the wording in your post title 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 choosing the ‘Custom Structure’ option and adding the /%postname%/ tag.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

If you need to set up custom structures for your tag and category page URLs here is where you would do this.

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 “topics” will make your category links display as ‘http://domain.com/topics/category_name/’.

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

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

To something like this …

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

Remember to save your 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

Use Descriptive Categories

To get the most benefit from 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 and author of the WordPress SEO plugin Joost de Valk, here are some things to consider if you are wondering whether you should add categories to your permalinks or not:

• If your category slug is short and descriptive (e.g. adds a relevant keyword or keyword phrase to your URL), you may want to add categories 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 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 category vs no category there really is no perfect permalink structure to use. We recommend choosing the permalink structure you think will suit your needs best and that will make your web address short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We cover WordPress categories in other tutorials.

Avoid Setting Up URL Syntaxes That Date Your Content

Another useful tip from Joost de Valk is that unless you run a news site or there is a special reason why you need to date your site’s content, avoid using date-based permalinks when configuring your blog’s URLs.

(Avoid setting up URL structures that date your content)

Although using permalinks that time-stamp your posts may be considered better that using no permalinks at all from an SEO aspect, people are less likely to click on posts that are a couple of years old, even if the content is relevant to what they are searching for.

What If My Site Has Indexed Posts?

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

If your website is already established or your site already has a lot of posts indexed in the search engines and you would like to change the permalink structure, make sure that this is something that absolutely needs doing, as doing so can create SEO issues and errors.

Use 301 Redirects

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

Maybe when you started, your site used the default WordPress URL structure and now you want to improve your SEO. Perhaps your site was configured to display post dates in your URLs and now all of your content is showing as being 2-3 years old and you want to remove the date portion of your permalinks.

The best way to modify your permalinks without impacting your site’s SEO or rankings in a negative way is to use ‘301 redirections’ to reassign links that were set up using the old permalinks structure to web addresses using the new permalink structure.

Search engines interpret a code ‘301’ as a link that has permanently relocated. 301 redirection is the most efficient and search engine friendly way to redirect users to new web page destinations and avoid ‘404’ (Page not found) errors if they click on an old link.

To effectively change your permalink structure and avoid SEO problems, sending visitors to broken links, etc. you will need to set up a redirection system before changing the permalink structure of your site.

You can site using a WP plugin like Simple 301 Redirects, or Redirection, or get a professional to assist you with setting up and redirecting your permalinks correctly to avoid problems and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up link redirections using plugins or use the services of a professional)

Congratulations! Now you know how to change your site’s permalinks to display search engine-friendly URLs for your posts and improve your search search rankings. To learn more about using Permalinks, see the official WordPress documentation here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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