Wouldn’t it be great if you could just add new content to your site, and the following took place … just from your page URL:

• Site visitors could gain an understanding of what the page is about,
• Search engines would easily find your pages and correctly index their content for better search results,
• Each piece of content published on your website would have a unique identifier, making your content easier to manage.

Well, with WordPress permalinks this can easily be done!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – Definition

Permalinks are the permanent URLs to your individual WordPress posts, categories and other taxonomies (a way to group things together) like archives.

A permalink is the web address that visitors and search engines will use to link to your articles or sections of your site or the links you send in an email pointing readers to a specific item of content on your website. Permalinks are sometimes referred to as “pretty” URLs.

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

Permalinks – Why Do You Need To Use Them?

As you probably know, WordPress is one of the best Content Management Systems you can use when it comes to SEO.

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

If you focus on the SEO aspect of your site or blog, then you should not ignore the importance of your site’s URLs. Google tends to give special significance to the structure of URLs when indexing pages.

Permalinks are used to turn links on your site into “prettier” and more “search engine friendly” URLs. Permalinks also improve the aesthetics, usability, and forward-compatibility of your links.

Now … let’s review the reason why you should configure your permalinks when publishing content in WordPress.

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

The link structure shown above is used by WordPress to locate information inside its database. It doesn’t really help your website with on-site SEO.

As the screenshot taken from Google search listings below shows, many WordPress site owners are still using out of the box settings when publishing content …

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

To get the best SEO benefit out of using 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 and archived posts, so your pages can go from this …

To something like this …

In this tutorial, you will learn how to configure the Permalinks section of your WordPress site to display your posts with search engine-friendly URLs instead of the default URL structure and help every new post you add automatically get better indexing in search engines like Google.

Setting Up Your WordPress Permalinks

From your WP admin menu, select 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 need to specify a different Permalink structure than the one set by default.

Common Settings – Permalinks

In the Common Settings section, select Custom Structure, then add one or more ‘tags’ (see below) to create search engine-friendly URLs …

(Change 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/cruise-travel/romantic-cruise-holiday-deals

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=7941

(Using post name permalinks helps readers understand what the post is about)

How To Create SEO-Friendly Tags In WordPress

“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, four digits (e.g. ‘2017’)
• %monthnum% – The month your post is published (e.g. ‘01’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘20’)
• %hour% – The hour your post gets published (e.g. ‘02’)
• %minute% – The minute your post is published (e.g. ‘35’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘56’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘686’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of your post title. For example, if the post title is ”It Ain’t Worth Doin’ No More!”, the postname tag will convert this into “it-aint-worth-doin-no-more” (all letters converted to lower case and punctuation marks removed) in the URL. Tip: You can always edit this text 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 choosing the ‘Custom Structure’ setting and using the /%postname%/ tag.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

If you need to configure custom structures for your tag and category page URLs you can do this in this section.

This changes the ‘base’ tag or category for your URLs using the following structure:

• domain.com/category_base/category_name
• domain.com/tag_base/tag_name

For example, using “topics” as your category base would 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 go from looking like this …

To something like this …

If you leave these 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 – Tips

Use Descriptive Categories

To get the most benefit out of using Permalinks, you will need 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 consider if you are wondering whether you should add categories to your permalinks or not:

• If your domain is short and your category is short and descriptive (e.g. uses a relevant keyword or keyword phrase), you may want to use the category tag in 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 share or copy and decrease 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 it’s recommended that you do not use the category tag in your permalink structure.

Ultimately, when it comes to category vs no category there really is no ideal permalink structure to use. Choose a permalink structure that you think will suit your site best. Many SEO experts and webmasters recommend making your web address short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We provide more information about WordPress categories in another article.

Don’t Use Date Permalinks

Another tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your website is a news blog or there is a special reason why you need to add dates to your URLs, it’s best to avoid selecting date-based permalink syntax when setting up your site’s URLs.

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

Although setting up URL structures that time-stamp your content is better that using no permalinks at all from an SEO perspective, people are less likely to click on posts that are several years old, even if the content is relevant to the answers they are searching for.

Changing Permalinks In An Established Site

Normally, your permalinks should be configured when you install a new WordPress site. This should be part of your site planning process.

If your website or blog is already established or you have a lot of content already 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 making changes to permalinks after your site has already been up and running for a while can create issues and loss of traffic.

Add 301 Redirects

As you’ve seen in the above screenshots of actual search results, some WordPress site owners (or whoever set up their site) are unaware of the search-friendly URLs feature of WordPress.

Maybe you started out using the default WordPress URL structure and now you want to improve your SEO. Maybe your website or blog was configured to display post dates in your URLs and now all of your posts are perceived as being outdated and you want to remove the date portion in the permalinks.

The best way to change your URL structure without negatively impacting your site’s SEO or existing rankings is to use ‘301 redirects’ to point links using the old permalink syntax to URLs using the new syntax.

Search engines interpret a ’301′ code as a link that has permanently been relocated to another destination. 301 redirects are the most efficient and search engine friendly way to redirect users to new web page destinations and avoid page errors if clicking on an old link.

To effectively change your syntax and avoid SEO problems, sending visitors to error pages, etc. you will need to configure 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 help you set up and redirect your permalinks correctly to avoid any issues and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up a redirection system using plugins or use the services of a professional)

Congratulations! Now you know about the built-in system WordPress uses to display search engine-friendly URLs for your posts. For additional information on using Permalinks, refer to the official WordPress documentation below:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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