Wouldn’t it be great if you could simply publish new content on your website or blog, and the following would then take place … all from your web address:

• Potential site visitors could quickly assess what the page is about,
• Google could easily find your page and correctly classify your content to improve your search rankings,
• Each post added to your website or blog would have its own unique identifier, making your content easier to manage.

Well, this is what WordPress permalinks let you do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalink – What Is It?

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 will 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 often called “pretty” URLs.

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

Permalinks – Why Do You Need To Use Them?

As you are probably aware, WordPress is one of the best CMS tools available when it comes to publishing search optimized content.

WordPress is not only great for SEO out of the box, but there are SEO plugins you can install that will help to finetune its SEO aspect considerably.

If you are looking to optimize the SEO aspect of your website, then you cannot ignore the importance of your URLs. Google places considerable weight on the URL structure of your site.

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

Now … let’s see the reason why you should set up permalinks if publishing content in WordPress.

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

WordPress uses the above link with a string query to locate data within its database. It does not mean much to anyone, and it doesn’t help your site with on-site SEO.

As the screenshot image taken from Google search listings below shows, many WordPress site owners haven’t yet configured their sites to publish search optimized content …

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

To get the best SEO benefit from using WordPress and improve your site’s traffic results, you should set up 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 and archived posts, so your content can easily go from something that is non-SEO friendly like this …

To this …

Out of the box, WordPress URLs are not very search engine-friendly. In this tutorial, you will learn how to set up the Permalinks section of your WordPress site to help your content rank better in search engines like Google.

Setting Up WordPress Permalinks

In your WordPress dashboard menu, 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 a search engine friendly URL instead for our posts. To do this, we need to specify a different Permalink structure than the default one.

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 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-deals/river-cruise-holiday-bargains

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=5068

(Using post name permalinks helps visitors understand what the post is about)

WordPress Permalink Tags

“Pretty” URLs, or search engine-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. ‘2017’)
• %monthnum% – The month the post gets published (e.g. ‘10’)
• %day% – The day the post gets published (e.g. ‘19’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘19’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘36’)
• %second% – The exact second your post is published (e.g. ‘36’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘199’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of your post title. For example, if your 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 letters converted to lower case and no punctuation marks) 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’.

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’ category or tag URLs using the following structure:

• 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/uncategorized/’.

So, if you add the following to your permalinks Optional > Category base settings section …

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

To this …

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

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 – Tips

Set Up Categories

To get the best possible 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 and author of the WordPress SEO plugin Joost de Valk, here are some things to consider if you are wondering whether you should add categories to your permalink structure or not:

• If your domain is short and your category slug is short and descriptive (e.g. adds a relevant keyword or keyword phrase to your URL), you may want to use the category tag 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 copy and decrease the SEO benefit.
• Do you plan to post content under only one category or multiple categories? 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 needs best and that will make your site’s web addresses short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We cover WordPress categories in other articles.

Avoid Using Date-Based Permalink Syntax

Another tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your site is a news site or you have any special reason to date your site’s content, avoid using date-based permalink syntax when configuring your site’s URLs.

(Avoid using URL structures that date your posts)

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 Permalinks In Site With Many Published Posts

Normally, your site’s permalinks should be configured when you perform a new WordPress installation. 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 something that absolutely needs doing, as changing permalinks after your site has already been up and running for a while can create SEO issues and loss of traffic.

301 Redirection

As you’ve seen in earlier screenshots, some WordPress users (or whoever set up their site) 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 want to improve your site’s SEO. Perhaps your website was originally set up to display post dates in your URLs and now all of your content is perceived as being outdated and you want to delete the date tags in the permalinks.

To change your permalink structure without negatively impacting your site’s SEO or rankings you should use ‘301 redirections’ to point links that were set up using the old permalinks syntax to page URLs that use the new permalink structure.

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

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

You can site or blog using a redirection plugin like Simple 301 Redirects, or Redirection, or get a professional to help you set up and redirect your permalinks correctly to avoid any problems and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up URL redirections using a WP plugin or use the services of a professional)

Congratulations! Now you know how to set up your WordPress site or blog to display SEO-friendly URLs for your posts. To learn more about using Permalinks, refer to the official WordPress documentation here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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