Wouldn’t it be great if after adding a new page to your site, the following could take place … all from your post URL:

• Visitors could glean what your post was about,
• Google could easily discover your post and correctly index the content for better search rankings,
• Each post published on your website or blog would have a unique identifier, making your content easier to manage.

Well, with WordPress permalinks this is very easy to do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – Definition

Permalinks are the permanent URLs to your individual WordPress posts, categories and other taxonomies (a way to organize things together) like archives.

A permalink is the web address that visitors and search engines will use to link to posts 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 URLs to each post on your site permanent, hence a permalink.

Why Do You Need To Use Permalinks?

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 install that can help to improve its SEO aspect.

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

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

Now … let’s turn our attention to the reason why you may need to use permalinks in WordPress.

Typically, a default WordPress installation uses a URL structure for your posts that isn’t very search engine friendly and looks like this …

WordPress uses the link with a string query shown above to locate information within your database. It does not mean anything to either visitors or search engines, and it doesn’t help your site with on-site SEO.

As the screenshot image from Google search listings below shows, many WordPress site owners are still using out of the box settings when publishing content …

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

To get optimal SEO benefit out of using and improve your site’s rankings, you will want to make sure to set up your permalinks structure to make it more SEO-friendly by displaying relevant keywords in your URL, instead of meaningless numbers and symbols.

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

To something with an SEO-friendly URL like this …

Out of the box, WordPress post URLs are not very search engine-friendly. This step-by-step tutorial explains how to configure your permalinks in WordPress to display your posts with SEO-friendly URLs.

Configuring Your WordPress Permalinks

In your WordPress administration section select, 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 “pretty” permalink instead for our posts. To do this, we need to specify a different Permalink structure than the default one.

Common Permalink Settings

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

(Set up 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/budget-travel/how-to-save-money-on-cruise-travel

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=2687

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

Pretty 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 the post is published, four digits (e.g. ‘2016’)
• %monthnum% – The month the post gets published (e.g. ‘12’)
• %day% – The day the post gets published (e.g. ‘12’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘10’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘26’)
• %second% – The exact second your post is published (e.g. ‘08’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘5408’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of the 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 characters converted to lower case and removed 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 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 ‘Custom Structure’.

Optional Permalink Settings

Here you can set custom structures for your tag and category URLs.

This changes the ‘base’ tag or category for your URLs using the following syntax:

• domain.com/category_base/category_name
• domain.com/tag_base/tag_name

For example, using “travel” as your category base will display your category links as ‘http://domain.com/travel/category_name/’.

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 fields blank the defaults will be used.

Remember to save any changes when 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

Use Short, Descriptive Categories

To get more SEO benefit from using Permalinks, it’s important 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 a few 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 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 share or copy and decrease the SEO benefit.
• 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. Use the permalink structure that you think will suit your needs best. Your web address should be short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We provide more information about WordPress categories in another tutorial.

Make Your Content Timeless

Another great tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your aim is to run a news blog or you have any special reason to create dated post addresses, avoid choosing date-based permalink syntax when setting up your blog’s URLs.

(Avoid setting up permalinks that time-stamp your content)

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

What If My Site Has Content?

Normally, it’s best to configure your permalinks when you install a new WordPress site. This should be part of your website 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 doing so can create issues and errors.

301 Redirects

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

Maybe when you started, your site used the default WordPress URL structure and now you would like to improve your site’s SEO. Maybe your website or blog 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 of your URLs.

The best way to change your URL structure without negatively affecting your site’s SEO is to add ‘301 redirects’ to point links that use the old URL structure to destinations that use the new permalinks structure.

Search engines interpret a code ‘301’ as a link that has permanently relocated. 301 redirection is the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect visitors to new website destinations and avoid running into page errors when following an old link.

To create an effective syntax change and avoid SEO problems, sending visitors to error pages, etc. you should set up a redirection system before messing with the permalink structure of your site.

You can site or blog using a WordPress redirection plugin 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 issues and troubleshoot any errors.

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

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

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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