Wouldn’t it be great if after adding a new post to your WordPress website, the following happened … all from your post URL:

• Potential visitors could assess what your post is about,
• Search engines would easily find your posts and correctly index their content for better search results,
• Every single piece of content added to your website or blog would have its own unique ID, making your content easier to manage.

Well, this is what a WordPress permalink lets you do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

What’s A Permalink?

Permalinks are the permanent URLs to your individual 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 articles or sections of your site or the links you send in an email pointing to content items on your site. Permalinks are often called “pretty” URLs.

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

Why Do You Need To Use Permalinks?

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

WordPress is not only well optimized right out of the box, but there are SEO plugins you can use that can further help to improve 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 site’s URLs. Google places considerable weight on the URL structure of your site.

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

Now … let’s turn our attention to why it’s best to use permalinks in WordPress.

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

WordPress uses the link structure shown above to find data inside its database. It doesn’t really help your site with on-site search engine optimization.

As the screenshot image below shows, many site owners have not set up their sites to use permalinks …

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

To get the maximum SEO benefit from using WordPress and improve your site’s rankings, 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 and archived posts, so your content can easily go from this …

To something like this …

By default, WordPress post URLs are not very SEO-friendly. This tutorial shows you how to configure your WP permalinks to get better indexing results in search engines.

Setting Up Your WordPress Permalinks

Log into your WP admin section and click on Settings > Permalinks …

This will bring up 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 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 …

(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/europe-travel/best-value-european-river-cruises

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=8856

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

Search Engine-Friendly Tags

“Pretty” URLs, or search engine-friendly URLs, are created by adding one or more ‘tags’ in the Custom Structure field:

• %year% – The year the post gets published, four digits (e.g. ‘2018’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘07’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘02’)
• %hour% – The hour your post is published (e.g. ‘10’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘34’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘60’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘8143’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of the post title. For example, if your post title is ”It Ain’t Worth Doin’ No More!”, the postname tag will convert this into “it-aint-worth-doin-no-more” (all lower case characters and removed punctuation marks) in the URL. Tip: You can always edit this wording 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 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’.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

If you need to configure custom structures for your category and tag 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 “recipes” as your category base will make your category links display 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 this …

To something like this …

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

Remember to save any 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 – Tips

Categories

To get the maximum benefit from using Permalinks, remember 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 plugin developer Joost de Valk, here are a few things to keep in mind if you are wondering whether or not to add categories to your permalink structure:

• 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 share and decrease the SEO benefit.
• If you are going to post content under multiple categories, then we recommend not using the category tag in your permalink structure.

Ultimately, when it comes to adding category vs no category there is no ”better” 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 cover WordPress categories in another article.

Create Timeless Posts

Another great tip from Joost de Valk is that unless you run a news blog or there is a special reason why you need to date your site’s content, it’s best to avoid choosing date-based permalink settings for your blog’s URLs.

(Avoid setting up URL structures that time-stamp your content)

Although setting up permalinks that date your content may be considered better that using no permalinks at all from an SEO point-of-view, visitors are less likely to click on posts that are several years old, even if the content is relevant to what they are searching for.

Changing The Permalink Structure In Site With Published Posts

Normally, it’s best to set up your site’s permalinks when you create a new WordPress site. This should be part of your site planning process.

If your website has been running for a while or your site already has many posts indexed in the search engines and you would like to change the permalink structure, make sure that this is really something that needs to be done, as making changes to permalinks after your site has already been going for a while can create SEO issues and errors.

Use 301 Redirection

As you’ve seen in the above screenshots of actual search results, some WordPress site owners (or their web developers) are completely unaware of the permalinks feature of WordPress.

Maybe when you started out, 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 outdated and you want to delete the date tags in the permalinks.

The best way to edit your permalinks without negatively impacting your site’s SEO or rankings is to use ‘301 redirects’ to point links that were set up using the old permalink structure to web URLs using the new syntax.

Search engines interpret a code ‘301’ as a link that has permanently relocated to another destination. 301 redirection is the most efficient and search engine friendly way to redirect users to new website destinations and avoid page errors if following an old link.

To effectively change your permalink structure and avoid damaging your rankings, sending visitors to error pages, etc. you will need to add a redirection system before messing with the permalink structure of your site.

You can site or blog using a WordPress 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 any issues and troubleshoot any errors.

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

Congratulations! Now you know how to set up your site’s permalinks to display SEO-friendly URLs for your posts and improve your search results. To learn more about using Permalinks, refer to the official WordPress documentation below:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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