Wouldn’t it be great if you could just publish content on your site, and the following took place … just from your web address:

• Potential site visitors could glean what the page was about,
• Search engines could easily discover your posts and correctly classify their content for better search rankings,
• Each content item created on your website or blog would have a unique identifier, making your site 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 an individual post, category, or other taxonomy (a way to organize things together) like archives.

A permalink is the URL that others use to link to articles or sections of your site or the links you send in an email pointing to your posts. Some people refer to permalinks as “pretty” URLs.

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

Why Use Permalinks?

Hopefully, you are probably aware by now that, WordPress is one of the best CMS applications you can use when it comes to publishing search engines optimized content.

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

If you are looking to optimize the SEO aspect of your site, then you cannot ignore the importance of your site’s URLs. Search engines like Google place considerable weight on the structure of your site’s URLs when indexing its content.

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

Now … let’s see the reason why you may need to set up permalinks when publishing content in WordPress.

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

WordPress uses the above link structure with a string query to find information within its database. It does not mean anything to either visitors or search engines, and it doesn’t help your website with on-site search engine optimization.

As you can see from the screenshot image below taken directly from Google search listings, many WordPress users haven’t yet configured their sites to use WordPress permalinks …

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

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

To something with an SEO-friendly URL like this …

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

Changing Your WordPress Permalinks

From your WP admin menu, select 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 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 Permalink 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 search engine-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=7085

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

Creating Pretty WordPress URLs

“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, displayed as four digits (e.g. ‘2017’)
• %monthnum% – The month your post gets published (e.g. ‘10’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘14’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘04’)
• %minute% – The minute the post is published (e.g. ‘21’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘59’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘6612’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted version of your post title. For example, if your 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 letters and removed punctuation marks) in the URL. Tip: You can always edit the URL wording 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 adding the /%postname%/ tag in the ‘Custom Structure’ option.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

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

You can change the ‘base’ tag or category of 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 “recipes” would display your category links as ‘http://domain.com/recipes/uncategorized/’.

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

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

To something like this …

If you leave the optional settings fields blank the defaults will be used.

Remember to save your 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

Set Up Categories

To get the maximum SEO benefit from 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 some things to keep in mind if you are wondering whether or not to add categories to your permalinks:

• If your category is short and descriptive (e.g. adds a relevant keyword or keyword phrase to your URL), 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 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 it’s recommended that you do not use the category tag in your permalink structure.

Ultimately, when it comes to adding category vs no category there is no ”better” permalink structure to use. We recommend choosing the permalink structure you think will suit your needs best and that will make your site’s web addresses short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We cover WordPress categories in other tutorials.

Avoid Using Permalinks That Time-Stamp Your Posts

Another useful tip from Joost de Valk is that unless you run a news website or there is a special reason why you need to create dated web URLs, avoid using date-based permalinks when configuring your URLs.

(Avoid using URL structures that time-stamp your content)

Visitors are less likely to click on posts that are a couple of years old, even if the content is relevant to the answers they are searching for.

What About Established Blogs?

Normally, it’s best to set up your site’s permalinks when you perform a new WordPress installation. This should be part of your site planning process.

If your website or blog has been running for a while or your site already has a lot of content indexed in the search engines and you want to change the permalink structure, make sure that this is really necessary, as changing permalinks after your site has already been running for a while can create SEO issues and loss of traffic.

301 Redirection

As you’ve seen earlier, some WordPress users (or whoever set up their site) are completely unaware of the permalinks 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 site was originally set up to display post dates in your URLs and now all of your posts are showing as being two or three years old and you want to remove the date portion of the URLs.

The best way to edit your permalink structure without affecting your site’s SEO or rankings in a negative way is to add ‘301 redirections’ to point all links using the old URL structure to destinations using the new structure.

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

To create an effective syntax change and avoid SEO problems, 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 add a link redirection system to your do this using redirection plugins like Simple 301 Redirects, or Redirection, or use the services of a professional to help you set up and redirect your permalinks correctly to avoid any problems and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up link redirections using plugins or use the services of a professional)

Congratulations! Now you know how to set up your site’s permalinks to display SEO-friendly URLs for your posts and improve your search results. To learn more about using Permalinks, refer to the official WordPress documentation below:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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