Wouldn’t it be great if you could publish a new page on your WordPress website, and the following took place … just from your post address:

• New visitors could easily gain an understanding of what your post was about,
• Google would be able to discover your pages faster,
• Each content item published on your website or blog would have its own unique ID, making things easier to manage.

Well, this is what WordPress permalinks let you do!

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 group things together) like archives.

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

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

Why Do You Need To Use Permalinks?

Hopefully, you are probably aware by now that, WordPress is one of the best CMS tools you can use when it comes to SEO.

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

If you focus on the SEO aspect of your site, then you cannot ignore the importance of your site’s URLs. Google places considerable weight on the structure of URLs when indexing site pages.

Permalinks can be used to make the 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 review the reason why it’s best to set up permalinks if publishing content in WordPress.

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

The above link structure is used by WordPress to find information inside its database. It doesn’t really help your website with on-site SEO.

As you can see from the screenshot below, many WordPress site owners have not yet set up their sites to publish search optimized content online …

Although these sites are getting their content indexed on search engines, they are missing out on additional SEO benefits.

To get 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 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 posts, so your pages can go from something that is non-SEO friendly like this …

To this …

By default, WordPress URLs are not very search engine-friendly. In this tutorial, you will learn how to set up your permalinks in WordPress to help your content rank better in search engines.

Changing WordPress Permalinks

From your WP admin menu, select Settings > Permalinks …

This will bring 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 a search engine friendly URL instead for our posts. To do this, we need to specify a different Permalink structure than the default one.

Common Settings

In the Common Settings section, select Custom Structure, then add one or more ‘tags’ (see below) to create search engine-friendly URLs …

(Change 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-deals/5-favourite-european-cruise-destinations

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=1864

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

Permalink Tags

“Pretty” permalinks, or search engine-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. ‘2016’)
• %monthnum% – The month the post gets published (e.g. ‘08’)
• %day% – The day the post gets published (e.g. ‘30’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘01’)
• %minute% – The minute the post gets published (e.g. ‘34’)
• %second% – The exact second your post gets published (e.g. ‘33’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘6627’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted version of your post title. For example, if your 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 punctuation marks deleted) in the URL. Tip: You can always 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 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 ‘Custom Structure’ and adding the /%postname%/ tag.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

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

You can change the ‘base’ category or tag for your URLs using the following structure:

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

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

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

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

To this …

If you leave the fields blank WordPress uses the defaults.

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 Information

Use Descriptive Categories

To get more 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 Joost de Valk, here are a few points to keep in mind 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 are going to post content under multiple categories, then we recommend not using the category tag in your permalink structure.

Despite being the subject of intense debate in WordPress SEO circles, when it comes to using category vs no category there is no ideal permalink structure to use. Choose a permalink structure you think will suit your needs best. SEO experts recommend making your web address short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We provide detailed information about WordPress categories in other tutorials.

Don’t Use Date Permalinks

Another useful tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your site is a news site or you have a special reason to create dated web URLs, it’s best to avoid using date-based permalink syntax when setting up your site’s URLs.

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

Although setting up permalinks that date your content may be considered better that using no permalinks at all from an SEO perspective, people 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 Established Blogs?

Normally, it’s best to configure your site’s permalinks when you perform a new WordPress installation. This should be part of your website 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 something that absolutely needs doing, as changing permalinks after your site has already been running for a while can create issues and loss of traffic.

Use 301 Redirection

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

Maybe you started out using the default WordPress permalinks and now you would like to optimize your site better for search engines. Maybe your website was originally set up 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 of the permalinks.

To change your permalink structure without negatively affecting your site’s SEO or existing rankings you will need to add ‘301 redirects’ to point links using the old URL structure to URLs using the new syntax.

Search engines interpret a ’301′ code as a link that has permanently moved. 301 redirection is the most efficient and search engine friendly way to redirect visitors to new web page destinations and avoid ‘404’ (Page not found) errors if they click on an old link.

To create an effective permalink syntax change and avoid SEO problems, sending visitors to broken links, etc. you will need to add a redirection system before messing with the permalink structure of your site.

You can add a link redirection system to your do this using a WP redirection plugin like Simple 301 Redirects, or Redirection, or get a professional to help you set up and redirect your permalinks correctly to avoid any issues and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up link redirections using a WordPress redirection plugin or use the services of a professional)

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

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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