Wouldn’t it be great if you could just add a new page to your WordPress website, and the following happened … all from your post address:

• Potential site visitors could quickly determine what your post is about,
• Search engines would be able to easily discover your pages and correctly index their content for better search results,
• Each piece of content created on your site would have its own unique identifier, making your content easier to manage.

Well, with permalinks this can easily be done!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalink – What Is It?

A permalink is the permanent URL to your individual WordPress posts, categories and other taxonomies (a way to organize things together) like archives.

A permalink is the web address that other people will use to link to articles or sections of your site or the links you send in an email pointing readers to your posts. Some people also call permalinks “pretty” URLs.

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

Permalinks – Why Do We Need To Use Them?

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

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

If you focus on the SEO aspect of your site or blog, then you should not ignore the importance of its URLs. Google tends to pay special attention to the structure of URLs when indexing site pages.

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

Now … let’s review the reason why it’s best to use permalinks if publishing content in WordPress.

By default, a 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 find data inside your database. It doesn’t really mean much to anyone, and it doesn’t help your site with on-site SEO.

As the screenshot from Google search listings below shows, many WordPress users haven’t yet set up their permalinks to publish search optimized content online …

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

To get optimal SEO benefit out of using WordPress and improve your site’s rankings, you should configure your permalinks structure to make it more search engine-friendly by displaying relevant keywords in your URL, instead of meaningless characters.

WordPress lets you create a custom URL structure for your published posts, so your content can easily go from this …

To something like this …

By default, WordPress post URLs are not very search engine-friendly. This tutorial shows you how to set up the Permalinks section of your WordPress site to display your posts using SEO-friendly URLs.

Changing WordPress Permalinks

Log into your WordPress admin and select 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 a “pretty” permalink 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 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/cruise-travel/10-top-european-river-cruise-destinations

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=6423

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

Pretty URL 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. ‘2016’)
• %monthnum% – The month the post is published (e.g. ‘10’)
• %day% – The day your post is published (e.g. ‘09’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘06’)
• %minute% – The minute the post gets published (e.g. ‘45’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘13’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘684’)
• %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 no punctuation 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 sanitized 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 set up custom permalinks for your tag and category archive page URLs here is where you would do this.

You can change the ‘base’ category or tag of 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/category_name/’.

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

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

To something like this …

If you leave the fields blank WordPress uses the defaults.

Remember to save your changes after 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

Set Up Your Categories

To get more benefit out of using Permalinks, it’s important 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 permalink structure:

• 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 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 copy and reduce 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.

Despite being the subject of intense debate in WordPress SEO circles, when it comes to category vs no category there really is no ”better” permalink structure to use. Use the permalink structure you think will suit your site best. Your post URLs should be short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We cover WordPress categories in another tutorial.

Make Your Content Timeless

Another great tip from Joost de Valk is that unless you run a news website or there is a special reason why you need to create dated web addresses, avoid selecting date-based permalink settings when setting up your URLs.

(Avoid setting up 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 An Established Site

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

If your site is already established or your site already has a lot of 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 doing so can create SEO issues and loss of traffic.

301 Redirects

As you’ve seen earlier, some WordPress users (or their web developers) are completely unaware of the permalinks feature of WordPress.

Maybe when you started, your site used the default WordPress permalinks and now you would like to improve your site’s SEO. Perhaps your website was configured to display post dates in your web address and now all of your posts are perceived as being outdated and you want to remove the date tags of the permalinks.

The best way to edit your permalinks without negatively impacting your site’s SEO or existing rankings is to add ‘301 redirects’ to reassign all links using the previous permalink syntax to links using the new permalinks syntax.

Search engines interpret a ’301′ code as a link that has been permanently moved. 301 redirects are the most efficient and search engine friendly way to redirect users to new web page destinations and avoid running into ”page not found” errors if following an old link.

To effectively change your syntax and avoid SEO problems, sending visitors to error pages, etc. you should install and 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 use the services of a professional to assist you with setting up and redirecting your permalinks correctly to avoid problems and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up a link redirection system using a WordPress plugin or get professional assistance)

Congratulations! Now you know how to configure your WordPress site or blog to display search engine-friendly URLs for your posts. For additional information on using Permalinks, see the WordPress codex here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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