Wouldn’t it be great if after publishing new content on your WordPress website or blog, the following could happen … all from your post address:

• Site visitors could assess what the page is about,
• Google would be able to find your posts faster,
• Every single post added to your site would have a unique ID, making your content easier to manage.

Well, with permalinks this can easily be done!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

What Are Permalinks?

A permalink is the permanent URL 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 your posts or sections of your site or the links you send in emails pointing readers to a specific post on your website. Permalinks are often called “pretty” URLs.

Permalinks make the web address pointing to each post on your website permanent, hence a perma-link.

Why Use Permalinks?

Hopefully, by now you are probably aware that, WordPress is one of the best CMS tools available when it comes to SEO.

WordPress is not only great for SEO out of the box, but the SEO aspect can be considerably fine tuned using excellent SEO plugins.

If you are looking to optimize the SEO aspect of your site, then you cannot ignore the importance of your site’s URLs. Search engines like Google tend to pay special attention to the URL structure of your site.

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

Now … let’s turn our attention to the reason why you may need to use permalinks 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 …

The above link structure is used by WordPress to locate data within your database. It does not help your site with on-site search engine optimization.

As the screenshot image from Google search results below shows, many WordPress site owners haven’t yet set up their permalinks …

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

To get greater SEO benefit out of using WordPress and improve your site’s rankings, you will want to make sure to configure your permalinks structure to make it more SEO-friendly by displaying relevant keywords in your URL, instead of meaningless numbers and symbols.

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

To something like this …

In this step-by-step tutorial, you will learn how to set up the Permalinks section of your WordPress site to display posts using search engine-friendly URLs instead of the out-of-the-box linking structure and help every new post you add to your site automatically get better indexing in Google.

Changing WordPress Permalinks

From your WordPress main 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 will 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 SEO-friendly URLs …

(Set up 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/river-cruises/river-cruise-holiday-bargains

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=7063

(Using permalinks helps search engines and visitors understand what the post 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 the post is published, displayed as four digits (e.g. ‘2016’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘08’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘06’)
• %hour% – The hour your post is published (e.g. ‘04’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘41’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘31’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘1095’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of your post title. For example, if the post title is ”Ten Signs That You’re About To Get Fired From Your Job!”, the postname tag will convert this into “ten-signs-that-youre-about-to-get-fired-from-your-job” (all characters converted to lower case and removed exclamation symbols) in the URL. Tip: You can edit the URL wording 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 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’.

Optional Permalink Settings

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

You can change the ‘base’ tag or category for your URLs using the following syntax:

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

For example, using “news” as your category base would make your category links display as ‘http://domain.com/news/uncategorized/’.

So, if you enter the following in your permalinks Optional > Category base settings section …

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

To something like this …

If you leave the optional settings fields blank WordPress uses the default settings.

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 – Additional Notes

Categories

To get the best possible SEO benefit out of using Permalinks, remember 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 a few points to consider if you are wondering whether you should add categories to your permalinks or not:

• If your domain is short and your category name is short and descriptive (e.g. adds a relevant keyword or keyword phrase to your URL), 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 share and reduce 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 category vs no category there 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 post URLs short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We provide more information about WordPress categories in other articles.

Avoid Using Permalink Syntaxes That Time-Stamp Your Posts

Another tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your site provides news, or there is a special reason why you need to create dated web URLs, avoid selecting date-based permalink syntax when configuring your URLs.

(Avoid setting up permalinks that date your content)

Visitors are less likely to click on posts that are a couple of years old, even if the content is relevant to the answers they are searching for.

What About Sites With Indexed Posts?

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

If your website or blog 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 necessary, as doing so can create issues and loss of traffic.

Add 301 Redirection

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

Maybe you started out using the default WordPress URL structure and now you would like to optimize your site better for search engines. Maybe your website or blog was configured to display post dates in your URLs and now all of your posts are showing as being old and you want to remove the date tags in the permalinks.

The best way to change your permalinks without negatively impacting your site’s SEO is to add ‘301 redirections’ to point links that use the old URL structure to web addresses using the new permalinks syntax.

A ’301′ code is interpreted by search engines as a link that has permanently moved elsewhere. 301 redirects are the most efficient and search engine friendly way to redirect users to new site destinations and avoid running into ‘404’ (Page not found) errors if they click on an old link.

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

You can site using a WP 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 problems and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up 301 redirections using plugins or use the services of a professional)

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

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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