Wouldn’t it be great if after publishing a new page on your website, the following took place … just from your web address:

• Site visitors could easily determine what your post is about,
• Search engines could easily discover your pages and correctly index their content for better search results,
• Every item of content you create on your website would have its own unique ID, making things easier to manage.

Well, with WordPress permalinks you can!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

What Are Permalinks?

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 web address 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 articles on your site. Permalinks are sometimes referred to as “pretty” URLs.

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

Permalinks – Why Do We Need To Use Them?

Hopefully, you probably know by now that, WordPress is one of the best Content Management Systems available when it comes to SEO.

WordPress is not only well optimized right out of the box, but there are SEO plugins you can use that can help to fine tuned its SEO aspect further.

If you are looking to optimize the SEO aspect of your website, then you should not ignore the importance of its URLs. Google tends to give special significance to the URL structure of your site.

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

Now … let’s turn our attention to the reason why it’s best to set up permalinks in WordPress.

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

The link structure shown above is used by WordPress to find information within its database. It does not mean anything to visitors or search engines, and it doesn’t help your website with on-site search engine optimization.

As you can see from the screenshot below taken from Google search results, many WordPress users have not configured their permalinks …

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

To get the greatest SEO benefit from using WordPress and improve your site’s traffic results, you should configure 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 posts, so your pages can easily go from this …

To this …

In this step-by-step tutorial, you will learn how to set up your WordPress permalinks to display posts with SEO-friendly URLs instead of the out-of-the-box URL structure and help every new post you publish automatically get better indexing results in Google.

Changing WordPress Permalinks

In your WordPress main menu, click on Settings > Permalinks …

This brings 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 default one.

Permalinks > Common Settings

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

(Configure 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/top-ten-european-river-cruises

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=1466

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

SEO-Friendly Tags

“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, displayed as four digits (e.g. ‘2015’)
• %monthnum% – The month the post gets published (e.g. ‘08’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘30’)
• %hour% – The hour the post gets published (e.g. ‘09’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘34’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘15’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘418’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of your post title. For example, if your post title is “Top Five Budget Travel Tips!”, the postname tag will convert this into “top-five-budget-travel-tips” (all lower case letters and exclamation marks removed) in the URL. Tip: You can always 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’ option.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

If you need to configure custom permalinks for your tag and category archive page URLs 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, using “topics” as your category base will make your category links display as ‘http://domain.com/topics/category_name/’.

So, if you add the following to 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 WordPress uses the defaults.

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 – Tips

Categories

To get the optimal benefit out of 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 a few points to consider if you are wondering whether or not to add categories to your permalinks:

• If your category 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 copy and reduce the SEO benefit.
• If you plan 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 ”better” permalink structure to use. Use a permalink structure you think will suit your needs best. SEO experts recommend making your web addresses short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We cover WordPress categories in other articles.

Create Timeless Posts

Another useful 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 settings when setting up your URLs.

(Avoid using URL structures that date your content)

People are less likely to click on a post if it is several years old, even if the content is relevant to what they are searching for.

What About Changing Permalinks In Established Blogs?

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

If your site is already established 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 something that needs to be done, as changing permalinks after your site has been up and running for a while can create SEO issues and errors.

Use 301 Redirects

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

Maybe you started out using the default WordPress permalinks and now you would like to improve your SEO. Perhaps your site was configured 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 permalinks.

To edit your permalink structure without negatively impacting your site’s SEO or existing rankings you will need to add ‘301 redirections’ to point all links using the old permalink syntax to URLs using the new permalinks syntax.

Search engines interpret a code ‘301’ as a link that has permanently moved to another location. 301 redirection is the most efficient and search engine friendly way to redirect users to new site destinations and avoid ”page not found” errors when clicking on an old link.

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

You can add a link redirection system to your site using WP redirection plugins like Simple 301 Redirects, or Redirection, or get 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 permalinks using redirection 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. To learn more about using Permalinks, see the WordPress codex here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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