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

• Potential site visitors could easily determine what your post is about,
• Google would be able to discover your posts faster,
• Every single post published on your website would have a unique ID, making your content easier to manage.

Well, this is what permalinks let you do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – Definition

Permalinks are the permanent URLs to an individual post, category, or other taxonomy (a way to organize things together) like archives.

A permalink is the URL that people and search engines will use to link to your posts or sections of your site or the links you send in an email pointing to a specific post on your website. Some people also call permalinks “pretty” URLs.

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

Why Use Permalinks?

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

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

If you focus on the SEO aspect of your site, then you cannot ignore the importance of its URLs. Search engines like Google place considerable weight on the URL structure of your site.

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

Now … let’s take a look at the reason why you should set up permalinks in WordPress.

By default, a WordPress installation uses a link-naming structure for your posts that isn’t very search engine friendly and looks like this …

WordPress uses the above link structure to find data inside your database. It doesn’t really mean much to anyone, and it doesn’t help your website with on-site search engine optimization.

As you can see from the screenshot image below, many WordPress site owners are still using default settings when publishing content online …

Although these sites are getting their content indexed on search engines, many site owners are missing out on additional SEO benefits.

To get optimal SEO benefit out of using WordPress and improve your site’s traffic results, you will want to make sure to configure your permalinks structure to make it more SEO-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 content can go from this …

To something with an SEO-friendly URL like this …

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

Setting Up Your WordPress Permalinks

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

Common Settings – Permalinks

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/romantic-cruise-holiday-deals

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=8767

(Using permalinks helps readers understand what the page is about)

Pretty Permalink Tags

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

• %year% – The year the post gets published, four digits (e.g. ‘2016’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘08’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘31’)
• %hour% – The hour your post gets published (e.g. ‘04’)
• %minute% – The minute the post is published (e.g. ‘57’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘39’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘116’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of the post title. For example, if the 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 punctuation marks deleted) in the URL. Tip: You can edit this 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 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 selecting the ‘Custom Structure’ setting and using the /%postname%/ tag.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

If you need to set up custom structures for your tag and category archive pages you can do this in this section.

This changes the ‘base’ category or tag for your 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/category_name/’.

So, if you enter the following in your permalinks Optional > Category base settings field …

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

To this …

If you leave the optional settings fields blank WordPress uses the default settings.

Remember to save any changes after 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 SEO benefit from 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 expert Joost de Valk, here are some things to consider if you are wondering whether or not to add categories to your permalink structure:

• If your category slug 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 share or 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 category vs no category there really is no perfect permalink structure to use. We recommend choosing the permalink structure you think will suit your needs best and that will make your post URLs short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We cover WordPress categories in other articles.

Avoid Using Date-Based URLs

Another tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your aim is to run a news site or there is a special reason why you need to create dated website URLs, it’s best to avoid choosing date-based permalinks when setting up your site’s URLs.

(Avoid setting up URL structures that time-stamp your posts)

Visitors are less likely to click on posts that are a couple of years old, even if the content is relevant to the answers they are searching for.

Changing The Permalink Structure In An Established Blog

Normally, your permalinks should be set up when you first install WordPress. 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 want to change the permalink structure, make sure that this is really necessary, as changing permalinks after your site has been going for a while could create SEO issues and loss of traffic.

Use 301 Redirection

As you’ve seen in the above screenshots of actual search results, some site owners (or whoever set up their site) 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. Maybe your website was configured to display post dates in your URLs and now all of your content is showing as being old and you want to remove the date portion of the permalinks.

To edit your permalinks without negatively affecting your site’s SEO or rankings you will need to use ‘301 redirects’ to reassign all links that use the previous permalinks structure to destinations that use the new permalink structure.

A ’301′ code is interpreted by search engines as a link that has permanently moved. 301 redirection is the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect visitors to new website destinations and avoid running into ”page not found” errors when following an old link.

To effectively change your permalink structure and avoid damaging your search rankings, sending visitors to error pages, etc. you will need to add your redirection system before messing with the permalink structure of your site.

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

(Set up URL redirections using a WP plugin or get professional assistance)

Congratulations! Now you know about the built-in system WordPress uses to display search engine-friendly URLs for your posts. For additional information on using Permalinks, see the WordPress codex below:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

***