Wouldn’t it be great if you could publish new content on your website, and the following would then happen … just from your page URL:

• Users could glean what your post is about,
• Google would find your pages faster,
• Every item of content added to your website would have its own unique ID, making your content easier to manage.

Well, with WordPress permalinks you can!

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 group things together) like archives.

A permalink is the web address that others use to link to your posts or sections of your site or the links you send in emails pointing readers to content items on your site. Permalinks are often called “pretty” URLs.

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

Why Use Permalinks?

Hopefully, you probably know by now 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 there are SEO plugins you can use that will help to fine tuned its SEO aspect.

If you focus on the SEO aspect of your site, then you cannot ignore the importance of its site’s URLs. Search engines like Google tend to pay special attention to the structure of URLs when indexing its site pages.

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

Now … let’s review the reason why it’s best to use permalinks when publishing content in WordPress.

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

WordPress uses the link structure with a string query shown above to locate information inside its database. It doesn’t really mean much to anyone, and it doesn’t help your site with on-site SEO.

As the screenshot below shows, many WordPress users haven’t configured their permalinks to publish search optimized content …

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

To get optimal SEO benefit out of using 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 offers the ability 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 …

By default, WordPress post URLs are not very SEO-friendly. This tutorial shows you how to set up the Permalinks section of your WordPress site to get better indexing in search engines.

How To Change WordPress Permalinks

From your WordPress dashboard menu, select Settings > Permalinks …

This brings 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 will 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 SEO-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/cruise-deals/cruise-holiday-deals

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=5191

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

Search Engine-Friendly Tags

“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% – The month the post is published (e.g. ‘08’)
• %day% – The day your post gets published (e.g. ‘04’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘04’)
• %minute% – The minute the post gets published (e.g. ‘33’)
• %second% – The exact second your post is published (e.g. ‘06’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘3589’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of the 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 exclamation symbols deleted) in the URL. Tip: You can edit this text 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’ setting and adding the /%postname%/ tag.

Optional Permalink Settings

In this section, you can set custom structures for your tag and category 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 “topics” as your category base will display your category links as ‘http://domain.com/topics/uncategorized/’.

So, if you add the following to your permalinks Optional > Category base settings section …

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

To something like this …

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

Remember to save your changes after 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 – Additional Info

Use Descriptive Categories

To get greater SEO 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 and author of the WordPress SEO plugin Joost de Valk, here are a few things to keep in mind if you are wondering whether you should add categories to your permalink structure or not:

• If your domain is short and your category slug is short and descriptive (e.g. uses a relevant keyword or keyword phrase), you may want to add categories 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 copy and decrease 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 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 ideal permalink structure to use. We recommend choosing the permalink structure you think will suit your needs best and that will make your web address short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We provide more information about WordPress categories in another article.

Don’t Use Date Permalinks

Another useful tip from Joost de Valk is that unless you run a news website or blog or there is a special reason why you need to add dates to your post URLs, avoid selecting date-based permalinks when configuring your blog’s URLs.

(Avoid using permalinks that time-stamp your posts)

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.

Changing Your Permalink Structure In An Established Site

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

If your site 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 something that absolutely needs doing, as changing permalinks after your site has been up and running for a while could create issues and loss of traffic.

Use 301 Redirection

As you’ve seen earlier, some WordPress users (or their web developers) seem to be unaware of the permalinks feature of WordPress.

Maybe you started out using the default WordPress permalinks and now you want to optimize your site better for search engines. Maybe your site was configured to display post dates in your web address and now all of your content is showing as being old and you want to delete the date portion of your URLs.

To edit your permalinks without impacting your site’s SEO or rankings in a negative way you should use ‘301 redirects’ to reassign all links using the old permalinks syntax to web URLs using the new permalinks syntax.

Search engines interpret a code ‘301’ as a link that has permanently been relocated. 301 redirects are the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect users to new site destinations and avoid running into ”page not found” errors if they click on an old link.

To effectively change your syntax 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 site using a redirection plugin 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 problems and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up URL redirections using a WordPress redirection plugin or get professional assistance)

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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