Wouldn’t it be great if you could simply add new content to your WordPress site, and the following would then take place … just from your page address:

• Site visitors could easily determine what your post was about,
• Google would easily discover your pages and correctly index their content to improve your search results,
• Every single content item added to your website or blog would have its own unique identifier, making things easier to manage.

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

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – What Are They?

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

A permalink is the web address that others will use to link to posts or sections of your site or the links you send in emails pointing readers to articles on your site. Permalinks are often called “pretty” URLs.

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

Permalinks – Why Use Them?

As you are probably aware, WordPress is one of the best CMS applications you can use when it comes to publishing search optimized content.

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

If you are looking to optimize the SEO aspect of your website, then you cannot ignore the importance of your URLs. Search engines like Google place considerable weight on the structure of a site’s URLs when indexing its content.

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

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

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

WordPress uses the link structure shown above to find data within its database. It does not help your website with on-site search engine optimization.

As the screenshot image from Google search results below shows, many WordPress users have not yet configured their permalinks to publish search optimized content …

Although Google is still indexing the above sites, the owners of these sites are missing out on extra SEO benefits.

To get the best SEO benefit from 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 allows you 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 …

To this …

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

Changing Your WordPress Permalinks

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

Common Settings

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/cruise-travel/how-to-save-money-on-cruise-travel

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=123

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

Pretty Permalink Tags

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

• %year% – The year the post gets published, displayed as four digits (e.g. ‘2016’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘09’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘16’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘05’)
• %minute% – The minute your post gets published (e.g. ‘43’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘54’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘5996’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of the 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 letters converted to lower case and exclamation marks removed) in the URL. Tip: You can edit the words in your post title 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 selecting the ‘Custom Structure’ setting and using the /%postname%/ tag.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

If you need to configure custom structures for your tag and category archive page URLs here is where you would do this.

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

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

For example, changing your category base to “travel” would make your category links display as ‘http://domain.com/travel/category_name/’.

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

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

To this …

If you leave the optional settings fields blank the default settings 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 – Additional Info

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, WordPress will use the default category (uncategorized).

According to WordPress SEO expert 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 name is short and descriptive (e.g. uses a relevant keyword or keyword phrase), you may want to add the category tag 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 or share and reduce the SEO benefit.
• 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.

Ultimately, when it comes to category vs no category there really is no ideal permalink structure to use. Use the permalink structure you think will suit your site best. Many SEO experts recommend making your web address short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We cover WordPress categories in other tutorials.

Make Your Content Timeless

Another great tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your site is a news site or you have a special reason to date your content, it’s best to avoid using date-based permalink settings when setting up your site’s URLs.

(Avoid using permalinks that date your content)

Although setting up URL structures that time-stamp your content may be considered better that using no permalinks at all from an SEO perspective, visitors are less likely to click on a post if it is several years old, even if the content is relevant to the answers they are searching for.

What If My Site Already Has Lots Of Indexed Posts?

Normally, it’s best to set up your site’s permalinks when you create a new WordPress site. This should be part of your site 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 changing permalinks after your site has already been up and running for a while can create SEO issues and loss of traffic.

Add 301 Redirection

As you’ve seen in the above screenshots of actual search results, some WordPress site owners (or whoever set up their site) seem to be completely 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. Perhaps your site was originally set up to display post dates in your web address and now all of your posts are perceived as being out-of-date and you want to remove the date portion in the URLs.

To change your permalink structure without affecting your site’s SEO in a negative way you should add ‘301 redirections’ to reassign links using the old permalinks structure to destinations using the new permalinks structure.

A ’301′ code is interpreted by search engines as a link that has permanently moved to another destination. 301 redirects are the most efficient and search engine friendly way to redirect users to new site destinations and avoid running into ‘404’ (Page not found) errors if clicking on an old link.

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

You can add a link redirection system to your site or blog using a plugin like Simple 301 Redirects, or Redirection, or get a professional to help you set up and redirect your permalinks correctly to avoid issues and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up 301 redirections using plugins or use the services of a professional)

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. For additional information on using Permalinks, refer to the WordPress codex below:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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