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

• Site readers could quickly determine what your page is about,
• Search engines could find your pages faster,
• Each post you create on your website or blog would have a unique ID, making your site easier to manage.

Well, with WordPress permalinks you can easily do this!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalink – What Is It?

A permalink is the permanent URL to an individual post, category, or other taxonomy (a way to group 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 an email pointing readers to posts on your site. Permalinks are often called “pretty” URLs.

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

Permalinks – Why Do You Need To Use Them?

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

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

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

Permalinks can be 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 turn our attention to the reason why it’s best to set up permalinks when publishing content in WordPress.

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

The above link structure is used by WordPress to find information inside your database. It doesn’t really mean much to anyone, and it doesn’t help your website with on-site SEO.

As the screenshot image taken from Google search listings below shows, many WordPress users have not yet configured their permalinks …

Although Google is still indexing the above sites, they 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 numbers and symbols.

WordPress allows you to create a custom URL structure for your published and archived posts, so your content can easily go from this …

To something like this …

By default, WordPress URLs are not very search engine-friendly. This step-by-step tutorial shows you how to configure the Permalinks section of your WordPress site to display posts with SEO-friendly URLs.

Setting Up Your WordPress Permalinks

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

Permalinks - 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/river-cruises/how-to-save-money-on-cruise-travel

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=2916

(Using post name permalinks helps visitors understand what the page is about)

Search Engine-Friendly Tags

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

• %year% – The year the post is published, four digits (e.g. ‘2015’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘03’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘02’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘04’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘57’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘30’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘5535’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted version of your 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 characters converted to lower case and removed punctuation marks) in the URL. Tip: You can edit the URL 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 choosing the ‘Custom Structure’ option and adding the /%postname%/ tag.

Optional Permalink Settings

If you need to configure custom permalinks for your tag and category archive pages here is where you would do this.

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

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

For example, using “recipes” as your category base will make your category links display as ‘http://domain.com/recipes/category_name/’.

So, if you make the following change 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 defaults 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

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, WordPress will use the default category (uncategorized).

According to WordPress SEO plugin developer Joost de Valk, here are a few things to consider if you are wondering whether you should add categories to your permalinks or not:

• If your domain is short and your category 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 and decrease the SEO benefit.
• If you are going to post content under multiple categories, then it’s recommended that you do not use 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 ”better” permalink structure to use. Use a permalink structure you think will suit your needs best. Your post URLs should be short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We cover WordPress categories in another article.

Make Your Content Timeless

Another useful tip from Joost de Valk is that unless you plan to run a news blog or you have any special reason to add dates to your URLs, avoid selecting date-based permalink options for your site’s URLs.

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

Visitors are less likely to click on a post if it is a couple of years old, even if the content is relevant to the answers they are searching for.

What If My Site Already Has Lots Of Content?

Normally, your site’s permalinks should be set up when you create a new WordPress site. 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 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 Redirection

As you’ve seen earlier, many website owners (or whoever set up their site) are unaware of the search-friendly URLs feature of WordPress.

Maybe when you started out, your site used the default WordPress URL structure and now you want to improve your SEO. Perhaps your website was originally set up to display post dates in your web address and now all of your posts are showing as being 2-3 years old and you want to delete the date portion of the permalinks.

The best way to change your permalink structure without negatively affecting your site’s SEO is to use ‘301 redirects’ to point links that were set up using the previous permalink structure to web URLs using the new permalink syntax.

Search engines interpret a code ‘301’ as a link that has permanently moved elsewhere. 301 redirection is the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect users to new website destinations and avoid ”page not found” errors when clicking on an old link.

To effectively change your syntax and avoid SEO problems, sending visitors to broken links, etc. you will need to install and set up your redirection system before messing with the permalink structure of your site.

You can site using a WP 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 301 redirections using a WP plugin 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, refer to the WordPress codex here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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