Wouldn’t it be great if after publishing new content on your WordPress site, the following could happen … all from your web address:

• Potential visitors to your site could easily understand what your post was about,
• Search engines could discover your posts faster,
• Every post published on your website would have its own unique ID, making things easier to manage.

Well, with permalinks you can easily do this!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – Definition

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 URL that visitors and search engines will use to link to your posts or sections of your site or the links you send in emails pointing readers to a particular post on your website. Permalinks are often called “pretty” URLs.

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

Why Use Permalinks?

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

WordPress is not only great for SEO out of the box, but its SEO aspect can be further enhanced using SEO plugins.

If you are looking to optimize the SEO aspect of your website, then you cannot ignore the importance of your site’s URLs. Search engines like Google tend to pay special attention to the structure of a site’s URLs when indexing pages.

Permalinks are used to turn links on your site into “search engine friendly” URLs. Permalinks 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 …

WordPress uses the above link structure to find data inside your database. It does not mean anything to visitors or search engines, and it doesn’t help your website with on-site search engine optimization.

As you can see from the screenshot below, many site owners have not yet configured their permalinks to publish search optimized content online …

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

To get the most SEO benefit from using WordPress and improve your site’s traffic results, you should set up your permalinks structure to make it more search engine-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 easily go from this …

To this …

By default, WordPress post URLs are not very SEO-friendly. This step-by-step tutorial explains how to configure the Permalinks section of your WordPress site to help your content rank better in search engines like Google.

Changing Your WordPress Permalinks

From your WP dashboard menu, click on 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 search engine friendly URLs instead for our posts. To do this, we need to specify a different Permalink structure than the default one.

Common Settings – Permalinks

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)

If you use the custom permalink structure shown in the example above, your URL would look something like this:

http://www.mytravelsite.com/river-cruises/how-to-save-money-on-cruise-travel

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=392

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

Creating Permalink Tags In Custom Structure

“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, four digits (e.g. ‘2016’)
• %monthnum% – The month the post is published (e.g. ‘02’)
• %day% – The day the post is published (e.g. ‘12’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘01’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘46’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘12’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘3727’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted version of the post title. For example, if the 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 no exclamation marks) 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’ setting.

Optional Permalink Settings

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

This changes 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, using “topics” as your category base would make your category links display as ‘http://domain.com/topics/category_name/’.

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

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

To this …

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

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

Set Up Your Categories

To get the greatest benefit from using Permalinks, it’s important 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 points to consider if you are wondering whether you should add categories to your permalink structure or not:

• If your domain is short and your category is short and descriptive (e.g. uses a relevant keyword or keyword phrase), 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.
• 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 category vs no category there really is no perfect permalink structure to use. Choose a permalink structure that you think will suit your needs best. Your post URLs should be short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We provide more information about WordPress categories in another article.

Avoid Date-Based Permalinks

Another useful tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your site provides news, or there is a special reason why you need to date your content, it’s best to avoid choosing date-based permalink syntax for your URLs.

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

Although setting up URL structures that date your content is better that using no permalinks at all from an SEO aspect, 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 An Established Blog?

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

If your site has been running for a while or your site already has many posts indexed in the search engines and you want to change the permalink structure, make sure that this is something that absolutely needs doing, as making changes to permalinks after your site has already been running for a while can create SEO issues and errors.

Add 301 Redirects

As you’ve seen earlier, some WordPress site owners (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 permalinks and now you would like to optimize your site better for search engines. Perhaps your site was originally set up to display post dates in your URLs and now all of your posts are showing as being old and you want to delete the date tags of your permalinks.

To edit your permalinks without negatively affecting your site’s SEO you should use ‘301 redirections’ to reassign links that use the old permalinks structure to page URLs that use the new permalinks syntax.

A code ‘301’ is interpreted by search engines as a link that has permanently been relocated to another address. 301 redirection is the most efficient and search engine friendly way to redirect visitors to new site destinations and avoid ‘404’ (Page not found) errors when they click on an old link.

To effectively change your permalink structure and avoid damaging your rankings, sending visitors to error pages, etc. you should set up a redirection system before changing the permalink structure of your site.

You can WP site or blog using redirection plugins like Simple 301 Redirects, or Redirection, or get a professional to assist you with setting up and redirecting your permalinks correctly to avoid problems and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up 301 redirections using plugins or get professional assistance)

Congratulations! Now you know how to set up your blog to display search engine-friendly URLs for your posts and improve your search search rankings. For additional information on using Permalinks, refer to the WordPress codex below:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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