Wouldn’t it be great if after adding content to your WordPress website, the following could take place … just from your URL:

• Potential site visitors could easily gain an understanding of what your content is about,
• Search engines would find your posts faster,
• Every single post created on your website would have its own unique identifier, making your site easier to manage.

Well, with WordPress permalinks this can easily be done!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

What’s A Permalink?

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

A permalink is the URL that other people use to link to posts or sections of your site or the links you send in emails pointing to posts on your site. Permalinks are often called “pretty” URLs.

Permalinks make the URL 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 engines optimized content.

WordPress is not only great for SEO out of the box, but the SEO aspect can be easily improved with excellent SEO plugins.

If you focus on the SEO aspect of your site, then you should not ignore the importance of your URLs. Search engines like Google place considerable weight on the structure of URLs when indexing content.

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

Now … let’s see the reason why you may need to configure your permalinks when publishing content in WordPress.

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

The link structure shown above is used by WordPress to find data inside its database. It doesn’t really mean much to anyone, and it doesn’t help your site with on-site search engine optimization.

As the screenshot image taken directly from Google search listings below shows, many WordPress site owners haven’t set up their sites to use WordPress permalinks …

Although Google is clearly still indexing the above sites, many site owners are potentially missing out on extra SEO benefits.

To get maximum SEO benefit out of using WordPress and improve your site’s traffic results, you will want to make sure to set up your permalinks structure to make it more search engine-friendly by displaying relevant keywords in your URL, instead of meaningless characters.

WordPress lets you create a custom URL structure for your published posts, so your pages can go from something that is non-SEO friendly like this …

To this …

By default, WordPress URLs are not very search engine-friendly. In this step-by-step tutorial, you will learn how to configure your permalinks in WordPress to help your content rank better in search engines like Google.

How To Change Your WordPress Permalinks

In your WP main menu, 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 “pretty” permalinks instead for our posts. To do this, we need to specify a different Permalink structure than the default.

Common Settings

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

(Configure 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/europe-cruises/river-cruise-holiday-deals

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=431

(Using permalinks helps search engines and readers understand what the 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 your post is published, four digits (e.g. ‘2017’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘03’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘02’)
• %hour% – The hour the post gets published (e.g. ‘21’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘19’)
• %second% – The exact second the post is published (e.g. ‘37’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘4849’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted version of the 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 letters converted to lower case and removed exclamation marks) in the URL. Tip: You can always edit this wording 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 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 adding the /%postname%/ tag in the ‘Custom Structure’ setting.

Optional Permalink Settings

This section lets you set up custom structures for your tag and category URLs.

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, changing your category base to “travel” would 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 the defaults will be used.

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

Set Up Categories

To get the optimal 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 expert Joost de Valk, here are some points 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 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 we recommend not using the category tag in your permalink structure.

Despite being the subject of intense debate in WordPress SEO circles, when it comes to category vs no category there really is no ideal permalink structure to use. Use a permalink structure you think will suit your site best. Many SEO experts recommend making your post URLs short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We provide detailed information about WordPress categories in other tutorials.

Make Your Content Timeless

Another tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your website is a news site or there is a special reason why you need to create dated website URLs, avoid using date-based permalink settings for your URLs.

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

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

What About An Established Blog?

Normally, your permalinks should be configured when you first install WordPress. This should be part of your site planning process.

If your website or blog is already established or your site already has a lot of posts indexed in the search engines and you want to change the permalink structure, make sure that this is absolutely necessary, as doing so can create SEO issues and errors.

301 Redirection

As you’ve seen earlier, some WordPress users (or whoever set up their site) are unaware of the permalinks feature of WordPress.

Maybe when you started, your site used the default WordPress URL structure and now you want to optimize your site better for search engines. Perhaps your site was configured 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 tags of your permalinks.

To edit your permalink structure without negatively impacting your site’s SEO you should use ‘301 redirections’ to point all links set up using the previous permalinks syntax to post URLs that use the new permalink syntax.

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

To create an effective permalink structure change and avoid SEO problems, sending visitors to error pages, etc. you will need to configure a redirection system before changing the permalink structure of your site.

You can add a link redirection system to your do this using WP redirection plugins 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 any issues and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up a redirection system using redirection 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 search rankings. For additional information on using Permalinks, see the WordPress codex below:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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