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

• Potential site visitors could easily assess what the content is about,
• Google would be able to easily discover your page and correctly index its content for better search rankings,
• Every single post on your site would have its own unique ID, making your site easier to manage.

Well, with permalinks this can easily be done!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

What’s A Permalink?

A permalink is the permanent URL to an individual post, category, or other taxonomy (a way to organize things together) like archives.

A permalink is the web address that people and search engines use to link to posts or sections of your site or the links you send in emails pointing readers to a specific item of content on your website. Permalinks are often called “pretty” URLs.

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

Why Do You Need To Use Permalinks?

Hopefully, you are probably aware that, WordPress is one of the best CMS tools available when it comes to publishing search engines optimized content.

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

If you focus on the SEO aspect of your website, then you should not ignore the importance of its URLs. Search engines like Google tend to give special consideration to the URL structure of your site.

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

Now … let’s take a look at why it’s best to set up permalinks 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 …

The link structure shown above is used by WordPress to find information within its database. It does not mean much to anyone, and it doesn’t help your website with on-site search engine optimization.

As the screenshot taken directly from Google search listings below shows, many WordPress site owners haven’t yet set up their permalinks to publish search optimized content online …

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

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

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

To something with an SEO-friendly URL like this …

In this step-by-step tutorial, you will learn how to configure your WordPress permalinks to display posts using SEO-friendly URLs instead of the out-of-the-box URL structure and help every new post you add to your site or blog automatically get better indexing in Google.

Setting Up Your WordPress Permalinks

In your WordPress admin 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 search engine friendly URL instead for our posts. To do this, we need to specify a different Permalink structure than the 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 …

(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/travel-tips/how-to-save-money-on-cruise-travel

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=8582

(Using permalinks helps readers and search engines understand what your content is about)

WordPress 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. ‘2017’)
• %monthnum% – The month your post gets published (e.g. ‘05’)
• %day% – The day your post gets published (e.g. ‘13’)
• %hour% – The hour the post gets published (e.g. ‘02’)
• %minute% – The minute your post gets published (e.g. ‘28’)
• %second% – The exact second the post gets published (e.g. ‘58’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘5191’)
• %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 characters converted to lower case and exclamation marks deleted) in the URL. Tip: You can always edit the URL text 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’ option.

Optional Permalink Settings

If you need to configure custom permalinks for your tag and category archive pages you can do this in this section.

This changes the ‘base’ category or tag for your 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 would make your category links display as ‘http://domain.com/topics/category_name/’.

So, if you add the following to 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 any changes when 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 Descriptive Categories

To get maximum benefit out of using Permalinks, remember 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 some things 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 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 share 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.

Ultimately, when it comes to using category vs no category there is no ”better” permalink structure to use. Choose the permalink structure you think will suit your needs best. Many SEO experts recommend making your post URLs short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We provide detailed information about WordPress categories in other tutorials.

Make Your Content Timeless

Another tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your website provides news or time-specific information, or you have any special reason to date your content, it’s best to avoid selecting date-based permalink syntax when setting up your URLs.

(Avoid setting up permalinks that date 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 what they are searching for.

What If My Site Already Has Lots Of Content?

Normally, your site’s permalinks should be set up when you perform a new WordPress installation. 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 something that needs to be done, as making changes to permalinks after your site has been going for a while could create issues and loss of traffic.

Use 301 Redirects

As you’ve seen earlier, many WordPress users (or whoever set up their site) are unaware of the SEO-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 site was originally set up to display post dates in your web address and now all of your posts are perceived as being outdated and you want to remove the date tags of your permalinks.

The best way to modify your permalink structure without affecting your site’s SEO in a negative way is to add ‘301 redirections’ to reassign all links that use the old URL syntax to web URLs using the new syntax.

A code ‘301’ is interpreted by search engines as a link that has permanently moved. 301 redirects are the most efficient and search engine friendly way to redirect visitors to new web page destinations and avoid running into ‘404’ (Page not found) errors if they click on an old link.

To effectively change your permalink syntax and avoid SEO problems, sending visitors to broken links, etc. you should set up a redirection system before changing the permalink structure of your site.

You can site or blog using WP redirection plugins 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 link redirections using a WP redirection plugin or use the services of a professional)

Congratulations! Now you know how to set up your WordPress site or blog to display SEO-friendly URLs for your posts. For additional information on using Permalinks, see the official WordPress documentation below:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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