Wouldn’t it be great if after adding a new page to your website or blog, the following happened … just from your web address:

• Site visitors could quickly glean what your post is about,
• Search engines would be able to easily discover your pages and correctly classify their content to improve your search rankings,
• Every single content item on your website or blog would have its own unique ID, making your content easier to manage.

Well, this is what WordPress permalinks let you do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – Definition

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 others use to link to posts or sections of your site or the links you send in an email pointing to a specific item of content on your blog. Permalinks are often called “pretty” URLs.

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

Permalinks – Why Use Them?

As you are probably aware, WordPress is one of the best Content Management Systems available when it comes to SEO.

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

If you focus on the SEO aspect of your site or blog, then you cannot ignore the importance of your site’s URLs. Google places considerable weight on the structure of URLs when indexing site pages.

Permalinks are used to make the 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 take a look at the reason why you should configure your permalinks if publishing content in WordPress.

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

The above link structure is used by WordPress to find information within your database. It doesn’t really mean much to anyone, and it doesn’t help your website with on-site SEO.

As you can see from the screenshot image below taken from Google search results, many WordPress site owners haven’t configured their permalinks …

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

To get greater SEO benefit from 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 characters.

WordPress offers you the ability to create a custom URL structure for your published and archived 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 …

By default, WordPress post URLs are not very search engine-friendly. This tutorial explains how to set up your WP permalinks to display your posts with SEO-friendly URLs.

How To Configure Your WordPress Permalinks

In your WP administration menu, click on Settings > Permalinks …

This will bring 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 Permalink Settings

In the Common Settings section, select Custom Structure, then add one or more ‘tags’ (see below) to create SEO-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/travel-tips/three-best-european-cruise-destinations

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=9907

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

WordPress Permalink Tags

“Pretty” permalinks, 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. ‘2016’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘12’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘30’)
• %hour% – The hour your post gets published (e.g. ‘09’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘27’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘11’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘1428’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of the post title. For example, if the post title is ”The Five Don’ts Of DIY Home Repair!”, the postname tag will convert this into “the-five-donts-of-diy-home-repair” (all characters converted to lower case and removed exclamation symbols) in the URL. Tip: You can edit the URL text 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’ option.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

If you need to configure custom permalinks for your tag and category pages here is where you would do this.

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

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

For example, changing your category base to “news” will make your category links display as ‘http://domain.com/news/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 this …

To this …

If you leave the 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 maximum SEO 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 permalinks:

• If your category name is short and descriptive (e.g. uses a relevant keyword or keyword phrase), you may want to use categories 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 reduce the SEO benefit.
• Do you plan to post content under only one category or multiple categories? If you plan 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 adding category vs no category there really is no perfect permalink structure to use. We recommend choosing the permalink structure you think will suit your site best and that will make your web address short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We provide detailed information about WordPress categories in other articles.

Avoid Setting Up Permalink Syntaxes That Date Your Posts

Another great tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your aim is to run a news site or you have any special reason to create dated website URLs, avoid selecting date-based permalink syntax when configuring your blog’s URLs.

(Avoid using URL structures that date your posts)

Although using 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 a post if it is several years old, even if the content is relevant to the answers they are searching for.

What If My Site Already Has Lots Of Content?

Normally, your site’s permalinks should be configured when you create a new WordPress site. This should be part of your website 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 something that absolutely needs doing, as making changes to permalinks after your site has been up and running for a while can create issues and errors.

301 Redirection

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

Maybe when you started, your site used the default WordPress permalinks and now you would like to optimize your site better for search engines. Perhaps your website was originally set up to display post dates in your web address and now all of your posts are perceived as being out-of-date and you want to remove the date portion of the URLs.

To change your URL structure without impacting your site’s SEO or rankings in a negative way you should add ‘301 redirects’ to point all links that were set up using the old permalinks structure to web URLs using the new permalinks syntax.

Search engines interpret a ’301′ code as a link that has permanently moved elsewhere. 301 redirects are the most efficient and search engine friendly way to redirect visitors to new site destinations and avoid ‘404’ (Page not found) errors when following an old link.

To effectively change your permalink structure and avoid damaging your rankings, sending visitors to error pages, etc. you should set up your redirection system before changing the permalink structure of your site.

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

(Set up link redirections using plugins or get professional help)

Congratulations! Now you know about the built-in system WordPress uses to display search engine-friendly URLs for your posts and improve your search results. To learn more about using Permalinks, refer to the official WordPress documentation here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

***