Wouldn’t it be great if you could simply publish new content on your WordPress website, and the following happened … just from your page address:

• Users could determine what the post is about,
• Google would be able to easily discover your posts and correctly classify their content for better search rankings,
• Every content item on your website or blog would have a unique identifier, making your site easier to manage.

Well, with permalinks you can easily do this!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – What Are They?

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

A permalink is the web address that other people will use to link to your articles or sections of your site or the links you send in an email pointing readers to a particular item of content on your blog. Permalinks are sometimes referred to as “pretty” URLs.

Permalinks make the URLs to each post on your website permanent, hence a permalink.

Why Use Permalinks?

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 great for SEO out of the box, but there are excellent SEO plugins you can install that can easily help to enhance its SEO aspect.

If you are looking to optimize the SEO aspect of your website, then you cannot ignore the importance of its URLs. Google places considerable weight on the structure of URLs when indexing its site pages.

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 see why you should set up permalinks in WordPress.

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

The above link structure is used by WordPress to find information within 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 below shows, many site owners haven’t yet configured their sites to publish search optimized content online …

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

To get the maximum SEO benefit from using WordPress and improve your site’s rankings, you will want to make sure to 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 and archived posts, so your pages can go from something that is non-SEO friendly like this …

To something like this …

In this tutorial, you will learn how to set up your WordPress permalinks to display your posts using search engine-friendly URLs instead of the out-of-the-box linking structure and help every new post you publish get better indexing results in search engines.

Changing Your WordPress Permalinks

Log into your WordPress admin and click on Settings > Permalinks …

This brings 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 “pretty” permalinks instead for our posts. To do this, we need to specify a different Permalink structure than the default one.

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/river-cruises/best-value-european-river-cruises

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=9521

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

How To Create Permalink 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, four digits (e.g. ‘2017’)
• %monthnum% – The month the post is published (e.g. ‘01’)
• %day% – The day your post gets published (e.g. ‘02’)
• %hour% – The hour your post gets published (e.g. ‘20’)
• %minute% – The minute your post gets published (e.g. ‘54’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘34’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘625’)
• %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 letters converted to lower case and exclamation symbols removed) in the URL. Tip: You can edit the wording in your post titles 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 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.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

This section lets you configure custom structures for your tag and category archive pages.

This changes 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/category_name/’.

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

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

To this …

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

Remember to save any 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 – Additional Notes

Use Short, Descriptive Categories

To get maximum benefit from 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 plugin developer Joost de Valk, here are some points to consider if you are wondering whether or not to add categories to your permalinks:

• If your domain is short and your category slug is short and descriptive (e.g. adds a relevant keyword or keyword phrase to your URL), you may want to use categories 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 share 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 adding category vs no category there really is no perfect permalink structure to use. Choose a permalink structure you think will suit your needs best. Many SEO experts and webmasters recommend making your post URLs short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We provide detailed information about WordPress categories in another article.

Don’t Use Date Permalinks

Another tip from Joost de Valk is that unless you plan to run a news site or you have any special reason to add dates to your post URLs, avoid choosing date-based permalink settings when setting up your blog’s URLs.

(Avoid setting up URL structures that date your content)

People are less likely to click on posts that are several years old, even if the content is relevant to what they are searching for.

What If My Site Already Has Lots Of Content?

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

If your site is already established or your site already has many posts indexed in the search engines and you would like to change the permalink structure, make sure that this is absolutely something that needs doing, as changing permalinks after your site has been up and running for a while can create SEO issues and loss of traffic.

301 Redirects

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

Maybe you started out using the default WordPress URL structure and now you would like to improve your site’s SEO. Maybe your site was originally set up to display post dates in your URLs and now all of your posts are showing as being old and you want to remove the date portion of your URLs.

To change your URL structure without affecting your site’s SEO or rankings in a negative way you will need to add ‘301 redirections’ to reassign all links using the old URL structure to destinations using the new permalink structure.

A code ‘301’ 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 site destinations and avoid ”page not found” errors if 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 add your redirection system before messing with the permalink structure of your site.

You can WP site or blog using redirection plugins like Simple 301 Redirects, or Redirection, or get a professional to assist you with setting up and redirecting your permalinks correctly to avoid issues and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up link redirections using redirection plugins or get professional help)

Congratulations! Now you know about the built-in system WordPress uses to display SEO-friendly URLs for your posts and improve your search results. For additional information on using Permalinks, see the WordPress codex below:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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