Wouldn’t it be great if after publishing new content on your website, the following took place … all from your post address:

• Potential visitors to your site could tell what your post is about,
• Google could easily discover your page and correctly index its content to improve your search results,
• Each content item added to your site would have its own unique ID, making things easier to manage.

Well, with WordPress permalinks you can!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – Definition

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

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

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

Why Do You Need To Use Permalinks?

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

WordPress is not only great for SEO out of the box, but its SEO aspect can be considerably finetuned using excellent SEO plugins.

If you focus on the SEO aspect of your site, then you should not ignore the importance of its URLs. Google tends to pay special attention to the URL structure of your site.

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

Now … let’s review the reason why you should configure your permalinks in WordPress.

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

The link structure shown above is used by WordPress to find information inside its database. It does not mean anything to either search engines or visitors, and it doesn’t help your website with on-site search engine optimization.

As you can see from the screenshot image below taken from Google search results, many WordPress users are still using out of the box settings when publishing their content online …

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

To get the best possible 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 numbers and symbols.

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

To something like 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 URL structure and help every new post you publish get better indexing in Google.

How To Change Your WordPress Permalinks

In your WordPress dashboard 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 need to specify a different Permalink structure than the default one.

Permalinks - 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 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/romantic-cruise-holiday-deals

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=6750

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

Pretty Permalink Tags

“Pretty” permalinks, 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. ‘2016’)
• %monthnum% – The month the post gets published (e.g. ‘10’)
• %day% – The day your post is published (e.g. ‘18’)
• %hour% – The hour the post gets published (e.g. ‘13’)
• %minute% – The minute your post is published (e.g. ‘25’)
• %second% – The exact second the post is published (e.g. ‘16’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘5988’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of the post title. For example, if the post title is ”It Ain’t Worth Doin’ No More!”, the postname tag will convert this into “it-aint-worth-doin-no-more” (all lower case characters and exclamation symbols removed) in the URL. Tip: You can always edit the URL wording 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 adding the /%postname%/ tag in the ‘Custom Structure’ option.

Optional Permalink Settings

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

This changes the ‘base’ category or tag of 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” would display your category links as ‘http://domain.com/travel/category_name/’.

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

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

To this …

If you leave these fields blank the default settings will be used.

Remember to save your changes when 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 the maximum benefit out of using Permalinks, remember 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 consider if you are wondering whether or not to add categories to your permalink structure:

• If your domain is short and your category is short and descriptive (e.g. adds a relevant keyword or keyword phrase to your URL), 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 share or copy and reduce the SEO benefit.
• Do you plan to post content under only one category or multiple categories? 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 using category vs no category there really is no perfect permalink structure to use. Use a permalink structure that you think will suit your site best. Many SEO experts and webmasters recommend making your web address short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We cover WordPress categories in other tutorials.

Avoid Time-Stamping URLs

Another tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your site is a news blog or there is a special reason why you need to create dated post addresses, it’s best to avoid choosing date-based permalink options when configuring your URLs.

(Avoid using URL structures that date your posts)

Although using permalinks that date your content may be considered better that using no permalinks at all from an SEO perspective, visitors are less likely to click on posts that are a couple of years old, even if the content is relevant to what they are searching for.

What If My Blog Has Content?

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

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

Use 301 Redirects

As you’ve seen in earlier screenshots, some WordPress users (or whoever set up their site) seem to be unaware of the SEO-friendly URLs feature of WordPress.

Maybe when you started, your site used the default WordPress permalinks and now you want to optimize your site better for search engines. Maybe your website was configured 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 delete the date portion of the permalinks.

To modify your permalink structure without negatively impacting your site’s SEO or existing rankings you should add ‘301 redirections’ to point links that use the previous permalink structure to post URLs using the new permalinks structure.

A code ‘301’ is interpreted by search engines as a link that has permanently relocated. 301 redirects are the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect visitors to new site destinations and avoid running into page errors when clicking on an old link.

To effectively change your permalink syntax 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 WP 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 problems and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up 301 redirects using a WordPress plugin or use the services of a professional)

Congratulations! Now you know how to set up your WordPress site to display search engine-friendly URLs for your posts. For additional information on using Permalinks, refer to the WordPress codex here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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