Wouldn’t it be great if you could publish new content on your WordPress website, and the following took place … all from your web address:

• New visitors could easily gain an understanding of what your page is about,
• Search engines would be able to easily find your page and correctly classify its content to improve your search results,
• Each content item created on your site would have its own unique ID, making your content easier to manage.

Well, this is what WordPress 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 group things together) like archives.

A permalink is the web address that visitors and search engines will use to link to articles or sections of your site or the links you send in emails pointing to a particular post on your blog. Some people also call permalinks “pretty” URLs.

Permalinks make the web address pointing to each post on your blog permanent, hence a perma-link.

Permalinks – Why Do I Need To Use Them?

As you have probably heard by now, WordPress is one of the best CMS tools you can use when it comes to SEO.

WordPress is not only well optimized straight out of the box, but the SEO aspect can be considerably fine tuned with SEO plugins.

If you focus on the SEO aspect of your site or blog, then you should not ignore the importance of its URLs. Search engines like Google tend to pay special attention 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 also improve the usability, aesthetics, and forward-compatibility of your links.

Now … let’s take a look at the reason why it’s best to set up permalinks if publishing content in WordPress.

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

WordPress uses the above link structure with a string query to find data within your database. It does not help your website with on-site SEO.

As you can see from the image below taken from Google search results, many site owners haven’t set up their permalinks to publish search optimized content …

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

To get the most 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 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 …

In this tutorial, you will learn how to configure the Permalinks section of your WordPress site to display posts with SEO-friendly URLs instead of the default URL structure and help every new post you publish automatically get better indexing results in search engines.

Setting Up Your WordPress Permalinks

Log into your WP admin and click on 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 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 …

(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/budget-travel/three-top-european-cruise-destinations

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=1466

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

How To Create SEO-Friendly Tags In Custom Structure

“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, displayed as four digits (e.g. ‘2017’)
• %monthnum% – The month your post is published (e.g. ‘02’)
• %day% – The day the post is published (e.g. ‘16’)
• %hour% – The hour your post is published (e.g. ‘17’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘19’)
• %second% – The exact second the post is published (e.g. ‘60’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘2551’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted version of your 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 lower case characters and removed exclamation symbols) in the URL. Tip: You can always edit the words in your post title 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 the ‘Custom Structure’ option and adding the /%postname%/ tag.

Optional Permalink Settings

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

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

So, if you make the following change in your permalinks Optional > Category base settings section …

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

To something like this …

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

Remember to save any changes when 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 Descriptive Categories

To get more SEO benefit out of using Permalinks, you will need 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 and author of the WordPress SEO plugin Joost de Valk, here are a few things to consider if you are wondering whether or not to add categories to your permalinks:

• If your category name is short and descriptive (e.g. uses a relevant keyword or keyword phrase), you may want to use the category tag 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 copy or share and decrease 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 is no ”better” permalink structure to use. Choose a permalink structure that you think will suit your needs best. Many SEO experts and webmasters recommend making your web addresses short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We provide detailed information about WordPress categories in another article.

Create Timeless Posts

Another tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your website is a news blog or you have any special reason to date your site’s content, avoid using date-based permalink syntax when configuring your blog’s URLs.

(Avoid using URL structures that date your content)

Although setting up permalinks that date your content is 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 About Changing Permalinks In An Established Site?

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

If your website 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 really something that needs doing, as doing so can create SEO issues and errors.

301 Redirects

As you’ve seen in earlier screenshots, some WordPress users (or their web developers) are completely unaware of the SEO-friendly URLs feature of WordPress.

Maybe when you started out, your site used the default WordPress permalinks and now you want to improve your SEO. Maybe your website was originally set up to display post dates in your web address and now all of your content is showing as being 2-3 years old and you want to remove the date tags of your URLs.

To modify your permalinks without affecting your site’s SEO or rankings in a negative way you will need to use ‘301 redirects’ to point links set up using the old permalinks syntax to URLs using the new structure.

A ’301′ code is interpreted by search engines as a link that has permanently relocated to another address. 301 redirects are the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect users to new web page destinations and avoid ‘404’ (Page not found) errors if following an old link.

To effectively change your permalink structure and avoid damaging your search rankings, sending visitors to broken links, etc. you should add a redirection system before messing with the permalink structure of your site.

You can WordPress site using a redirection 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 redirection 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, refer to the official WordPress documentation here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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