Wouldn’t it be great if you could add new content to your website or blog, and the following happened … all from your URL:

• New visitors could easily determine what the post was about,
• Search engines would easily discover your pages and correctly classify their content to improve your search results,
• Each post on your website or blog would have a unique ID, making your content easier to manage.

Well, this is what a permalink lets you do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – What Are They?

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 visitors and search engines use to link to your articles or sections of your site or the links you send in emails pointing to a particular item of content on your blog. Some people refer to permalinks as “pretty” URLs.

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

Why Use Permalinks?

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

WordPress is not only well optimized straight out of the box, but its SEO aspect can be considerably enhanced with SEO plugins.

If you are looking to optimize the SEO aspect of your site, then you should not ignore the importance of its URLs. Google places considerable weight on the structure of a site’s URLs when indexing pages.

Permalinks are 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 take a look at the reason why you should configure your permalinks in WordPress.

By default, a WordPress installation uses a URL structure for your posts that isn’t search engine friendly and 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 you can see from the screenshot image below taken directly from Google search listings, many site owners are still using out-of-the-box permalink settings when publishing content …

Although Google is still indexing the above sites, they are potentially missing out on extra SEO benefits.

To get more SEO benefit out of using and improve your site’s traffic results, you should configure your permalinks structure to make it more SEO-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 posts, so your pages can easily go from something that is non-SEO friendly like this …

To something with an SEO-friendly URL like this …

Out of the box, WordPress URLs are not very SEO-friendly. This tutorial explains how to configure your WordPress permalinks to automatically help you get better indexing results in search engines.

Setting Up Your WordPress Permalinks

From your WP 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 search engine friendly URLs instead for our posts. To do this, we 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 …

(Set up 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/travel-tips/how-to-save-money-on-cruise-travel

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=7008

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

Creating Permalink 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 the post gets published, four digits (e.g. ‘2016’)
• %monthnum% – The month your post gets published (e.g. ‘12’)
• %day% – The day your post is published (e.g. ‘31’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘06’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘12’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘24’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘534’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of the post title. For example, if your 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 exclamation symbols deleted) in the URL. Tip: You can edit the words 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 adding the /%postname%/ tag in the ‘Custom Structure’ setting.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

If you need to configure custom permalinks for your tag and category pages you can do this in this section.

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

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

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

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

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

To this …

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

Remember to save your changes when 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 – Additional Information

Use Descriptive Categories

To get the most SEO benefit from 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 Joost de Valk, here are some things to keep in mind if you are wondering whether or not to add categories to your permalinks:

• 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 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 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 ”better” permalink structure to use. Use the permalink structure that you think will suit your site best. Many SEO experts recommend making your post URLs short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We cover WordPress categories in another article.

Avoid Setting Up URL Structures That Date Your Content

Another tip from Joost de Valk is that unless you run a news website or there is a special reason why you need to add dates to your URLs, it’s best to avoid choosing date-based permalink options for your URLs.

(Avoid using URL structures that time-stamp your posts)

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 The Permalink Structure In Site With Many Published Posts

Normally, it’s best to set up your permalinks when you install a new WordPress site. 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 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 been running for a while can create issues and errors.

Add 301 Redirection

As you’ve seen in earlier screenshots, some WordPress users (or their web developers) seem to be completely unaware of the SEO-friendly URLs feature of WordPress.

Maybe you started out using the default WordPress permalinks and now you want to optimize your site better for search engines. Maybe your site was originally set up to display post dates in your web address and now all of your content is showing as being two or three years old and you want to remove the date tags in the permalinks.

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

Search engines interpret a code ‘301’ as a link that has permanently been moved to another destination. 301 redirection is the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect visitors to new web page destinations and avoid running into ”page not found” errors if following an old link.

To create an effective syntax change and avoid damaging your rankings, sending visitors to error pages, etc. you should configure a redirection system before changing the permalink structure of your site.

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

(Set up a redirection system for your changed URLs using a WP plugin or use the services of a professional)

Congratulations! Now you know how to change your WordPress site or blog’s permalinks to display search engine-friendly URLs for your posts and improve your search results. For additional information on using Permalinks, see the WordPress codex below:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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