Wouldn’t it be great if after adding new content to your website or blog, the following happened … just from your page URL:

• Readers could glean what your page was about,
• Search engines would easily find your posts and correctly classify their content for better search results,
• Each piece of content on your website or blog would have a unique ID, making things easier to manage.

Well, with WordPress permalinks this can easily be done!

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 organize things together) like archives.

A permalink is the web address that others use to link to posts or sections of your site or the links you send in an email pointing to your posts. Some people also call permalinks “pretty” URLs.

Permalinks make the URL pointing to each post on your site permanent, hence a perma-link.

Why Do You Need To Use Permalinks?

Hopefully, you probably know by now that, WordPress is one of the best CMS applications available when it comes to SEO.

WordPress is not only well optimized right out of the box, but there are SEO plugins you can use that will help to fine tuned its SEO aspect further.

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

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

Now … let’s see why you may need to use permalinks if publishing content in WordPress.

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

The above link structure is used by WordPress to find information within your database. It does not mean much to anyone, 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 results, many site owners are still using out-of-the-box settings when publishing their content online …

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

To get maximum SEO benefit out of using and improve your site’s traffic results, you should 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 allows you to create a custom URL structure for your published posts, so your content can easily go from something that is non-SEO friendly like this …

To something like this …

By default, WordPress post URLs are not very SEO-friendly. In this step-by-step tutorial, you will learn how to set up your WP permalinks to display posts with search engine-friendly URLs.

Setting Up Your WordPress Permalinks

Log into your WordPress dashboard section and select Settings > Permalinks …

This brings 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 will need to specify a different Permalink structure than the one set by default.

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/budget-cruises/how-to-save-money-on-cruise-travel

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=1641

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

Creating Pretty URL Tags In Custom Structure

“Pretty” permalinks, or SEO-friendly URLs, are created by adding one or more ‘tags’ in the Custom Structure field:

• %year% – The year the post gets published, displayed as four digits (e.g. ‘2018’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘06’)
• %day% – The day your post gets published (e.g. ‘18’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘03’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘03’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘11’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘7815’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of your post title. For example, if the post title is “Top Five Budget Travel Tips!”, the postname tag will convert this into “top-five-budget-travel-tips” (all lower case characters and removed exclamation mark) 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 selecting the ‘Custom Structure’ setting and adding the /%postname%/ tag.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

If you need to set up custom structures for your category and tag archive page URLs you can do this in this section.

This changes the ‘base’ category or tag of your URLs using the following structure:

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

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

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

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

To something like this …

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

Remember to save your changes when 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 – Tips

Use Short, Descriptive Categories

To get the best possible SEO benefit from using Permalinks, it’s important 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 things to consider if you are wondering whether or not to add categories to your permalink structure:

• If your category slug is short and descriptive (e.g. uses a relevant keyword or keyword phrase), 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 decrease the SEO benefit.
• 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 category vs no category there is no ”better” permalink structure to use. Use the permalink structure that you think will suit your site best. Many SEO experts recommend making your post URLs short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We cover WordPress categories in other articles.

Create Timeless Posts

Another great tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your website provides news, or you have any special reason to create dated web addresses, avoid choosing date-based permalink options when setting up your blog’s URLs.

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

Although using permalinks that date your posts may be considered better that using no permalinks at all from an SEO aspect, visitors are less likely to click on a post that 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 permalinks should be set up when you first install WordPress. This should be part of your website planning process.

If your website or blog is already established or your site already has a lot of posts indexed in the search engines and you want to change the permalink structure, make sure that this is absolutely necessary, as making changes to permalinks after your site has already been going for a while can create SEO issues and errors.

Add 301 Redirection

As you’ve seen in the above screenshots of actual search results, some WordPress users (or their web developers) seem to be unaware of the search-friendly URLs feature of WordPress.

Maybe when you started, your site used the default WordPress permalinks and now you would like to optimize your site better for search engines. Perhaps your website or blog was configured to display post dates in your web address and now all of your posts are showing as being old and you want to delete the date tags in your URLs.

The best way to change your URL structure without impacting your site’s SEO or rankings in a negative way is to add ‘301 redirections’ to reassign links that were set up using the old URL syntax to URLs that use the new syntax.

A ’301′ code is interpreted by search engines as a link that has permanently been moved to another destination. 301 redirects are the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect visitors to new site destinations and avoid running into ”page not found” errors when following an old link.

To effectively change your syntax and avoid SEO problems, sending visitors to error pages, etc. you will need to set up a redirection system before messing with 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 help you set up and redirect your permalinks correctly to avoid issues and troubleshoot any errors.

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

Congratulations! Now you know how to configure your permalinks to display search engine-friendly URLs for your posts. To learn more about using Permalinks, refer to the official WordPress documentation here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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