Wouldn’t it be great if you could simply add a new post to your website, and the following took place … all from your page address:

• Potential visitors to your site could easily assess what your post was about,
• Search engines could easily discover your post and correctly classify its content for better search rankings,
• Each content item published on your website would have a unique identifier, making your content easier to manage.

Well, with WordPress permalinks this is really easy to do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

What Are Permalinks?

Permalinks are the permanent URLs to an individual WordPress post, category, or other taxonomy (a way to group things together) like archives.

A permalink is the web address that people and search engines use to link to posts or sections of your site or the links you send in emails pointing readers to your posts. Some people also call permalinks “pretty” URLs.

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

Permalinks – Why Do You Need To Use Them?

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 optimized content.

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

If you focus on the SEO aspect of your site, then you should not ignore the importance of its site’s URLs. Google tends to give special significance to the structure of URLs when indexing content.

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

Now … let’s turn our attention to the reason why it’s best to configure your permalinks if publishing content in WordPress.

Typically, a default WordPress installation uses a link-naming 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 does not mean anything to either search engines or visitors, and it doesn’t help your site with on-site SEO.

As the screenshot below shows, many WordPress users are still using out-of-the-box permalink settings when publishing their content …

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

To get maximum SEO benefit out of 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 characters.

WordPress lets you 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 this …

In this tutorial, you will learn how to set up the Permalinks section of your WordPress site to display your posts using SEO-friendly URLs instead of the out-of-the-box URL structure and help every new post you add to your site or blog get better indexing in search engines.

How To Set Up WordPress Permalinks

Log into your WP dashboard and 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 “pretty” permalinks 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 …

(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/cruise-travel/top-3-european-river-cruises

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=3487

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

How To Use Permalink Tags

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

• %year% – The year of the post, four digits (e.g. ‘2015’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘01’)
• %day% – The day your post is published (e.g. ‘17’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘19’)
• %minute% – The minute the post is published (e.g. ‘06’)
• %second% – The exact second the post gets published (e.g. ‘60’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘3940’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of your post title. For example, if your post title is ”The Five Don’ts Of DIY Home Repair!”, the postname tag will convert this into “the-five-donts-of-diy-home-repair” (all lower case characters and punctuation marks 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 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 ‘Custom Structure’.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

If you need to set up custom permalinks for your tag and category archive pages here is where you would do this.

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

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

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

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

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

To this …

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

Remember to save your changes when 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 – Tips

Set Up Your Categories

To get greater 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 plugin developer Joost de Valk, here are a few points to keep in mind if you are wondering whether you should add categories to your permalinks or not:

• 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 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.

Ultimately, when it comes to adding category vs no category there is no perfect permalink structure to use. Choose a permalink structure 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.

Avoid Using URL Syntaxes That Time-Stamp Your Posts

Another tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your website provides news, or you have any special reason to add dates to your URLs, it’s best to avoid using date-based permalink syntax when configuring your blog’s URLs.

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

Although setting up permalinks that time-stamp your posts is better that using no permalinks at all from an SEO perspective, people are less likely to click on a post that is several years old, even if the content is relevant to the answers they are searching for.

What About Changing Permalinks In Established Sites?

Normally, your permalinks should be set up when you create a new WordPress site. This should be part of your website planning process.

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 would like to change the permalink structure, make sure that this is really necessary, as doing so can create issues and errors.

301 Redirects

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

Maybe when you started, your site used the default WordPress URL structure and now you would like to optimize your site better for search engines. Maybe your website or blog was originally set up 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 portion of the URLs.

To edit your permalinks without negatively impacting your site’s SEO or rankings you will need to add ‘301 redirections’ to point links using the old permalinks structure to page URLs that use the new permalinks structure.

Search engines interpret a code ‘301’ as a link that has permanently relocated. 301 redirection is the most efficient and search engine friendly way to redirect users to new website destinations and avoid running into page errors if they click on an old link.

To effectively change your syntax and avoid SEO problems, sending visitors to error pages, etc. you should add a redirection system before changing the permalink structure of your site.

You can WP site using plugins 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 a link redirection system using plugins or use the services of a professional)

Congratulations! Now you know about the built-in system WordPress uses to display SEO-friendly URLs for your posts and improve your search search rankings. To learn more about using Permalinks, refer to the WordPress codex here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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