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

• New visitors could quickly gain an understanding of what the post was about,
• Search engines would be able to discover your posts faster,
• Every single item of content created on your website or blog would have its own unique identifier, making things easier to manage.

Well, with permalinks you can easily do this!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – What Are They?

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 web address that other people use to link to posts or sections of your site or the links you send in emails pointing readers to a specific item of content on your website. Permalinks are often called “pretty” URLs.

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

Why Use Permalinks?

As you have probably heard by now, WordPress is one of the best Content Management Systems you can use when it comes to publishing search engines optimized content.

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

If you focus on the SEO aspect of your site or blog, then you cannot ignore the importance of its URLs. Google tends to give special significance to the structure of URLs when indexing content.

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 turn our attention to why it’s best to configure your permalinks in WordPress.

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

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

As the screenshot below shows, many site owners have not yet set up their sites to use WordPress permalinks …

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

To get more SEO benefit from 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 lets you create a custom URL structure for your published posts, so your pages can go from this …

To this …

Out of the box, WordPress post URLs are not very SEO-friendly. In this step-by-step tutorial, you will learn how to set up the Permalinks section of your WordPress site to automatically get better indexing results in Google.

Setting Up Your WordPress Permalinks

From your WP administration menu, select 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 one set by 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 …

(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/europe-cruises/cruise-holiday-bargains

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=8679

(Using post name permalinks helps visitors and search engines understand what your page is about)

Using Permalink Tags In Custom Structure

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

• %year% – The year of the post, displayed as four digits (e.g. ‘2017’)
• %monthnum% – The month your post is published (e.g. ‘06’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘26’)
• %hour% – The hour the post is published (e.g. ‘20’)
• %minute% – The minute the post is published (e.g. ‘27’)
• %second% – The exact second the post is published (e.g. ‘48’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘1208’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted 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 letters converted to lower case and removed punctuation symbol) 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 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’ option and adding the /%postname%/ tag.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

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

You can change the ‘base’ category or tag for your 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” 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 looking like this …

To this …

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

Remember to save any changes when you are 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 Descriptive Categories

To get greater 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 things to keep in mind if you are wondering whether or not to add categories to your permalinks:

• If your category slug 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 share or copy and decrease the SEO benefit.
• If you plan 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 really is no perfect permalink structure to use. Use a permalink structure you think will suit your needs best. Your web addresses should be short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We cover WordPress categories in other articles.

Create Timeless Posts

Another great tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your website provides news, or there is a special reason why you need to add dates to your post URLs, avoid selecting date-based permalink syntax when setting up your URLs.

(Avoid setting up permalinks that date your content)

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

Changing Your Permalink Structure In Blog With Indexed Posts

Normally, your permalinks should be configured when you perform a new WordPress installation. This should be part of your website planning process.

If your website or blog is already established or you have a lot of content already indexed in the search engines and you would like to change the permalink structure, make sure that this is really necessary, as doing so can create SEO issues and loss of traffic.

Use 301 Redirects

As you’ve seen earlier, many website owners (or their web developers) are unaware of the permalinks feature of WordPress.

Maybe when you started out, your site used the default WordPress URL structure and now you want to improve your SEO. Maybe your website was configured to display post dates in your web address and now all of your content is perceived as being out-of-date and you want to remove the date portion in the URLs.

The best way to modify your permalinks without negatively affecting your site’s SEO is to add ‘301 redirects’ to reassign links set up using the old URL syntax to links using the new permalink syntax.

A ’301′ code is interpreted by search engines as a link that has permanently moved to another destination. 301 redirection is the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect visitors to new web page destinations and avoid page errors when following an old link.

To effectively change your permalink structure and avoid SEO problems, sending visitors to error pages, etc. you should install and set up your redirection system before changing the permalink structure of your site.

You can site or blog using a WP 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.

(Set up 301 redirections using plugins or get professional help)

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 official WordPress documentation here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

***