How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Learn how to set up permalinks in WordPress for improved content navigation and better search engine optimization …

Setting Up Your WordPress Permalinks

Wouldn’t it be great if after publishing new content on your website or blog, the following took place … all from your URL:

  • Site visitors could determine what the content was about,
  • Google would be able to find your pages faster,
  • Every single item of content on your website or blog would have a unique ID, making your site easier to manage.

Well, this is what a WordPress permalink lets you do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – What Are They?

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 your articles or sections of your site or the links you send in an email pointing to content items on your website. Permalinks are often called “pretty” URLs.

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

Why Do You Need To Use Permalinks?

As you have probably heard by now, WordPress is one of the best Content Management Systems available when it comes to SEO.

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

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

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 aesthetics, usability, and forward-compatibility of your links.

Now … let’s turn our attention to the reason why you may need to configure your permalinks in WordPress.

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

Improve Your WordPress SEO Using PermalinksWordPress uses the link structure with a string query shown above to find data inside your database. It doesn’t really mean much to anyone, and it doesn’t help your site with on-site SEO.

As the screenshot taken from Google search listings below shows, many site owners are still using default permalink settings when publishing their content online …

Using Permalinks To Improve Your WordPress SEO

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

To get the most SEO benefit from using WordPress 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 numbers and symbols.

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

Using Permalinks To Improve Your WordPress SEO

To this …

Using Permalinks To Improve Your WordPress SEO

By default, WordPress URLs are not very search engine-friendly. This tutorial explains how to configure your WordPress permalinks to help your content rank better in search engines like Google.

Changing Your WordPress Permalinks

In your WordPress admin select, Settings > Permalinks

Using Permalinks To Improve Your WordPress SEO

This will bring up the Permalink Settings screen …

Changing Your WordPress Permalinks

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

Common Permalink 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 search engine-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/europe-cruises/river-cruise-holiday-bargains

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=4950

Using permalinks helps visitors understand what the post is about

(Using permalinks helps visitors understand what your content is about)

Search Engine-Friendly Tags

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

  • %year% – The year the post is published, four digits (e.g. ‘2018’)
  • %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘12’)
  • %day% – The day the post is published (e.g. ‘16’)
  • %hour% – The hour your post is published (e.g. ‘08’)
  • %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘29’)
  • %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘13’)
  • %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘1086’)
  • %postname% – A correctly formatted version of your post title. For example, if your post title is “Top Five Budget Travel Tips!”, the postname tag will convert this into “top-five-budget-travel-tips” (all lower case letters and punctuation symbols removed) 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 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 …

How To Improve Your WordPress SEO Using Permalinks

Or, use one of the following structures:

Setting Up WordPress Permalinks

Practical Tip

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 …

How To Improve Your WordPress SEO Using SEO-Friendly URLs

Choosing ‘Post name’ is the same as adding the /%postname%/ tag in the ‘Custom Structure’ setting.

Optional Permalink Settings

Changing WordPress Permalinks

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

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

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

Using Permalinks To Improve Your WordPress SEO

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

Using Permalinks To Improve Your WordPress SEO

To this …

Setting Up WordPress Permalinks

If you leave these fields blank the default settings will be used.

Remember to save any changes when you are done …

Changing Your WordPress Permalinks

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 maximum SEO 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 a few points to consider if you are wondering whether you should add categories to your permalink structure or not:

  • If your category slug 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 or copy and decrease 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 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 adding category vs no category there really is no ideal permalink structure to use. Use a permalink structure you think will suit your site best. Your web addresses should be short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We cover WordPress categories in another tutorial.

Create Timeless Posts

Another tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your website is a news site or you have a special reason to add dates to your URLs, avoid choosing date-based permalinks when setting up your URLs.

Avoid using URL structures that time-stamp your content

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

Although setting up permalinks that time-stamp 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 several years old, even if the content is relevant to what they are searching for.

What If My Site Has Lots Of Content?

Normally, your site’s permalinks should be configured when you first install WordPress. This should be part of your website planning process.

Useful Information

If your website or blog has been running for a while or you have a lot of content already indexed in the search engines and you want to change the permalink structure, make sure that this is really necessary, as doing so could create SEO issues and errors.

301 Redirection

As you’ve seen in earlier screenshots, some WordPress site owners (or whoever set up their site) seem to be completely unaware of the search-friendly URLs feature of WordPress.

Maybe when you started out, your site used the default WordPress permalinks and now you want to optimize your site better for search engines. Perhaps your website was configured to display post dates in your URLs and now all of your posts are showing as being 2-3 years old and you want to remove the date portion in the URLs.

The best way to edit your permalinks without impacting your site’s SEO in a negative way is to use ‘301 redirects’ to reassign links using the old permalink syntax to page URLs using the new syntax.

A ’301′ code is interpreted by search engines as a link that has permanently been moved elsewhere. 301 redirection is the most efficient and search engine friendly way to redirect users to new website destinations and avoid page 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 set up your redirection system before messing with the permalink structure of your site.

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

WordPress redirection plugin Simple 301 Redirects

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

Congratulations! Now you know how to configure your blog’s permalinks to display SEO-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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