Wouldn’t it be great if after publishing new content on your website or blog, the following could happen … all from your page address:

• Users could quickly assess what the page was about,
• Google would discover your pages faster,
• Each piece of content published on your site would have its own unique identifier, making things easier to manage.

Well, with permalinks this is really easy to do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

What Is A Permalink?

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

A permalink is the web address that other people use to link to your posts or sections of your site or the links you send in an email pointing readers to content items on your site. Permalinks are often referred to as “pretty” URLs.

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

Permalinks – Why Do I Need To Use Them?

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

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

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

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

Now … let’s take a look at why you may need to set up permalinks in WordPress.

Typically, a default WordPress installation uses a URL-naming 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 find information within your database. It does not help your website with on-site search engine optimization.

As the screenshot image below shows, many site owners haven’t yet configured their permalinks to publish search optimized content …

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

To get optimal SEO benefit from using WordPress and improve your site’s traffic results, you should 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 and archived posts, so your pages can go from this …

To this …

In this step-by-step tutorial, you will learn how to set up your WordPress permalinks to display posts with SEO-friendly URLs instead of the out-of-the-box linking structure and help every new post you publish get better indexing in search engines like Google.

How To Configure WordPress Permalinks

In your WordPress dashboard area select, Settings > Permalinks …

This brings 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 “pretty” permalink instead for our posts. To do this, we need to specify a different Permalink structure than the default.

Common Settings – Permalinks

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 SEO-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-deals

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=759

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

Creating SEO-Friendly Tags

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

• %year% – The year of the post, four digits (e.g. ‘2017’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘02’)
• %day% – The day your post is published (e.g. ‘02’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘18’)
• %minute% – The minute your post is published (e.g. ‘45’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘42’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘604’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of your 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 exclamation marks deleted) in the URL. Tip: You can always edit the URL 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 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 selecting ‘Custom Structure’ and using the /%postname%/ tag.

Optional Permalink Settings

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

You can change the ‘base’ category or tag 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 would display your category links as ‘http://domain.com/travel/uncategorized/’.

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

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

To something like this …

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

Remember to save your 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

Use Short, Descriptive Categories

To get the best 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 some points to consider if you are wondering whether or not to add categories to your permalink structure:

• If your category is short and descriptive (e.g. uses a relevant keyword or keyword phrase), 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 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.

Ultimately, when it comes to adding category vs no category there is no perfect permalink structure to use. Use a permalink structure you think will suit your site 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 great tip from Joost de Valk is that unless you run a news website or there is a special reason why you need to date your content, it’s best to avoid choosing date-based permalink options for your blog’s URLs.

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

Although setting up URL structures that time-stamp your content is better that using no permalinks at all from an SEO point-of-view, people are less likely to click on a post if it is a couple of years old, even if the content is relevant to the answers they are searching for.

What About Changing Permalinks In Established Sites?

Normally, your site’s permalinks should be set up when you create a new WordPress site. This should be part of your website planning process.

If your site 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 issues and errors.

301 Redirection

As you’ve seen earlier, some website owners (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 SEO. Maybe your site was configured to display post dates in your URLs and now all of your content is perceived as being out-of-date and you want to remove the date tags of your URLs.

To modify your permalink structure without affecting your site’s SEO or existing rankings in a negative way you will need to use ‘301 redirects’ to point all links that use the old URL structure to links that use the new permalink syntax.

Search engines interpret a ’301′ code as a link that has been permanently moved to another destination. 301 redirects are the most efficient and search engine friendly way to redirect users to new web page destinations and avoid page errors if they click on an old link.

To effectively change your syntax and avoid SEO problems, sending visitors to broken links, etc. you will need to add your redirection system before changing the permalink structure of your site.

You can site using a WP 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 problems and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up link redirections using redirection plugins or get professional assistance)

Congratulations! Now you know about the built-in system WordPress uses to display search engine-friendly URLs for your posts and improve your search results. To learn more about using Permalinks, refer to the official WordPress documentation below:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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