How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Learn how to set up permalinks in WordPress for improved content navigation and better search engine optimization …

Improve Your WordPress SEO With SEO-Friendly URLs

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

  • Potential site visitors could glean what the page is about,
  • Search engines would discover your posts faster,
  • Every content item you create on your website or blog would have its own unique identifier, making things easier to manage.

Well, with permalinks you can!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – Definition

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

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

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

Permalinks – Why Do You Need To Use Them?

Hopefully, you are probably aware by now that, WordPress is one of the best CMS tools you can use when it comes to publishing search engines optimized content.

WordPress is not only well optimized straight out of the box, but the SEO aspect can be easily finetuned using SEO plugins.

If you focus on the SEO aspect of your website, then you cannot ignore the importance of its URLs. Search engines like Google tend to pay special attention to the URL structure of a site.

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

Now … let’s review the reason why you may need to set up permalinks when publishing content in WordPress.

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

How To Change Your WordPress PermalinksThe above link structure is used by WordPress to find information inside your database. It doesn’t really mean anything to visitors or search engines, and it doesn’t help your site with on-site search engine optimization.

As you can see from the image below taken from Google search results, many site owners haven’t yet set up their sites to use WordPress permalinks …

How To Change Your WordPress Permalinks

Although these sites are getting their content indexed on search engines, they are missing out on extra SEO benefits.

To get the maximum SEO benefit out of using and improve your site’s rankings, you will want to make sure to configure 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 go from something that is non-SEO friendly like this …

How To Configure WordPress Permalinks

To this …

Using Permalinks To Improve Your WordPress SEO

Out of the box, WordPress URLs are not very search engine-friendly. In this step-by-step tutorial, you will learn how to configure your WP permalinks to automatically get better indexing in search engines.

Changing Your WordPress Permalinks

In your WordPress dashboard click on, Settings > Permalinks

Using Permalinks To Improve Your WordPress SEO

This will bring up the Permalink Settings screen …

Using Permalinks To Improve Your WordPress SEO

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.

Common Settings

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

Change your permalink settings to create search engine-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/river-cruise-holiday-bargains

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=7391

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

(Using permalinks helps visitors and search engines understand what the page is about)

Permalink Tags

“Pretty” permalinks, or SEO-friendly URLs, are created by adding one or more ‘tags’ in the Custom Structure field:

  • %year% – The year the post is published, four digits (e.g. ‘2013’)
  • %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘01’)
  • %day% – The day the post is published (e.g. ‘07’)
  • %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘15’)
  • %minute% – The minute the post is published (e.g. ‘37’)
  • %second% – The exact second your post is published (e.g. ‘36’)
  • %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘1948’)
  • %postname% – A correctly formatted 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 lower case characters and punctuation symbols deleted) in the URL. Tip: You can edit the wording 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 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 …

Using Permalinks To Improve Your WordPress SEO

Or, use one of the following structures:

Using Permalinks To Improve Your WordPress SEO

Practical Tip

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 …

Improve Your WordPress SEO Using Permalinks

Choosing ‘Post name’ is the same as selecting the ‘Custom Structure’ option and using the /%postname%/ tag.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

How To Improve Your WordPress SEO With Permalinks

This section lets you set up custom structures for your tag and category archive pages.

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 display your category links as ‘http://domain.com/news/category_name/’.

So, if you make the following change in your permalinks Optional > Category base settings section …

Configuring Your WordPress Permalinks

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

How To Improve Your WordPress SEO Using SEO-Friendly URLs

To something like this …

Improve Your WordPress SEO With Permalinks

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

Remember to save any changes when done …

How To Set Up Your WordPress Permalinks

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

Categories

To get the most SEO benefit out of using Permalinks, remember to set up your WordPress Categories correctly. If you do not have any categories set up, adding a category tag to your permalink forces WordPress to use the default category (uncategorized).

According to WordPress SEO plugin developer Joost de Valk, here are some things to consider if you are wondering whether you should add categories to your permalinks or not:

  • If your category 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 copy and decrease 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 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 adding category vs no category there really is no perfect permalink structure to use. Choose the permalink structure you think will suit your needs best. Your web address should be short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We cover WordPress categories in other tutorials.

Make Your Posts Timeless

Another useful tip from Joost de Valk is that unless you plan to run a news website or you have a special reason to create dated website addresses, it’s best to avoid selecting date-based permalink syntax when setting up your URLs.

Avoid setting up URL structures that time-stamp your posts

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

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

What If My Blog Already Has Published Posts?

Normally, it’s best to configure your permalinks when you create a new WordPress site. This should be part of your site planning process.

Info

If your site is already established 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 really something that needs doing, as changing permalinks after your site has already been going for a while could create issues and loss of traffic.

301 Redirects

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

Maybe you started out using the default WordPress permalinks and now you would like to optimize your site better for search engines. Maybe your website was configured to display post dates in your web address and now all of your content is perceived as being outdated and you want to remove the date tags in your URLs.

The best way to modify your URL structure without affecting your site’s SEO or existing rankings in a negative way is to add ‘301 redirections’ to reassign all links using the old permalinks structure to page URLs that use the new permalink structure.

Search engines interpret a code ‘301’ as a link that has permanently been relocated. 301 redirection is the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect visitors to new web page destinations and avoid page errors if they click on an old link.

To effectively change your permalink syntax and avoid damaging your search rankings, sending visitors to broken links, etc. you will need to install and set up your redirection system before changing the permalink structure of your site.

You can site using a redirection plugin like Simple 301 Redirects, or Redirection, or use the services of a professional to help you set up and redirect your permalinks correctly to avoid any issues and troubleshoot any errors.

WP plugin Simple 301 Redirects

(Set up a link redirection system for your changed permalinks using redirection plugins or use the services of a professional)

Congratulations! Now you know how to set up your site’s permalinks to display SEO-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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