Wouldn’t it be great if you could just add a new page to your website or blog, and the following would then take place … all from your page address:

• Potential site visitors could quickly understand what the content was about,
• Google would easily find your posts and correctly classify their content for better search results,
• Each content item published on your site would have a unique ID, making your content easier to manage.

Well, this is what WordPress permalinks let you do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – Definition

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 URL that visitors and search engines use to link to your articles or sections of your site or the links you send in an email pointing to your posts. 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 are probably aware by now that, WordPress is one of the best Content Management Systems you can use when it comes to publishing search optimized content.

WordPress is not only great for SEO out of the box, but the SEO aspect can be further finetuned with SEO plugins.

If you focus on the SEO aspect of your site or blog, then you should not ignore the importance of your URLs. Google places considerable weight on the structure of URLs when indexing its content.

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

Now … let’s see the reason why it’s best to configure your permalinks in WordPress.

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

The link structure shown above is used by WordPress to locate information within its database. It doesn’t really 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, many WordPress users haven’t yet set up their permalinks …

Although Google is clearly still indexing the above sites, the owners of these sites are missing out on additional SEO benefits.

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

WordPress offers the ability to create a custom URL structure for your published posts, so your content can easily go from this …

To something like this …

Out of the box, WordPress URLs are not very search engine-friendly. In this tutorial, you will learn how to set up the Permalinks section of your WordPress site to help your content get better indexing results in Google.

How To Change Your WordPress Permalinks

From your WP dashboard 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 a “pretty” permalink instead for our posts. To do this, we need to specify a different Permalink structure than the one set by default.

Common Permalink 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-travel/top-ten-european-river-cruise-destinations

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=8366

(Using permalinks helps visitors and search engines understand what the post 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 your post is published, displayed as four digits (e.g. ‘2015’)
• %monthnum% – The month the post gets published (e.g. ‘08’)
• %day% – The day the post gets published (e.g. ‘06’)
• %hour% – The hour the post gets published (e.g. ‘24’)
• %minute% – The minute the post is published (e.g. ‘20’)
• %second% – The exact second the post is published (e.g. ‘11’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘2002’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted version of your 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 marks deleted) in the URL. Tip: You can edit the words in your post title 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 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 ‘Custom Structure’.

Optional Permalink Settings

This section lets you configure custom structures for your tag and category archive page 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 “recipes” would make your category links display as ‘http://domain.com/recipes/category_name/’.

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

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

To something like this …

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

Remember to save any changes when 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 – Tips

Categories

To get the best possible SEO benefit out of 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 expert and author of the WordPress SEO plugin Joost de Valk, here are a few 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 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 copy and reduce the SEO benefit.
• If you are going to post content under multiple categories, then we recommend not using the category tag in your permalink structure.

Ultimately, when it comes to category vs no category there is no ideal permalink structure to use. Use the permalink structure that you think will suit your site best. Your post URLs should be short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We provide more information about WordPress categories in another article.

Create Timeless Posts

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

(Avoid using permalinks that date your content)

Although setting up permalinks that date your content is better that using no permalinks at all from an SEO aspect, visitors are less likely to click on a post if it is several years old, even if the content is relevant to what they are searching for.

What About Changing Permalinks In An Established Blog?

Normally, it’s best to set up your permalinks when you first install WordPress. This should be part of your website planning process.

If your website or blog 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 absolutely necessary, as making changes to permalinks after your site has already been running for a while can create SEO issues and errors.

301 Redirects

As you’ve seen earlier, some WordPress users (or whoever set up their site) are completely 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 site’s SEO. Perhaps your website was configured to display post dates in your web address and now all of your content is perceived as being out-of-date and you want to remove the date portion in the permalinks.

The best way to modify your URL structure without negatively affecting your site’s SEO or existing rankings is to add ‘301 redirects’ to point all links using the old permalinks syntax to page URLs that use the new permalink structure.

Search engines interpret a ’301′ code as a link that has permanently relocated to another destination. 301 redirection is the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect users to new site destinations and avoid running into ”page not found” errors when clicking on an old link.

To effectively change your permalink syntax and avoid damaging your rankings, sending visitors to broken links, etc. you will need to install and set up a redirection system before changing the permalink structure of your site.

You can site using a WordPress 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 any problems and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up 301 redirections using a WP redirection plugin or use the services of a professional)

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

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

***