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 …

Using Permalinks To Improve Your WordPress SEO

Wouldn’t it be great if after adding a new post to your WordPress website, the following happened … just from your page URL:

  • Potential site visitors could easily gain an understanding of what the content is about,
  • Search engines would be able to easily find your page and correctly index its content for better search rankings,
  • Each content item added to your website would have its own unique identifier, making your content easier to manage.

Well, this is what WordPress permalinks let you do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – Definition

A permalink is the permanent URL to your individual posts, categories and other taxonomies (a way to organize things together) like archives.

A permalink is the URL that others will use to link to your posts or sections of your site or the links you send in an email pointing readers to articles on your site. Permalinks are often called “pretty” URLs.

Permalinks make the web address pointing to each post on your website permanent, hence a permalink.

Why Do You Need To Use Permalinks?

As you are probably aware, 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 its SEO aspect can be further finetuned using SEO plugins.

If you focus on the SEO aspect of your website, then you cannot ignore the importance of its site’s URLs. Search engines like Google tend to pay special attention to the URL structure of a site.

Permalinks are used to make the 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 why it’s best to use permalinks in WordPress.

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

Changing Your WordPress PermalinksWordPress uses the above link structure to locate data inside 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, many WordPress users have not yet configured their sites to use permalinks …

Improve Your WordPress SEO With SEO-Friendly URLs

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

To get optimal SEO benefit from using and improve your site’s rankings, you will want to make sure to 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 offers you the ability to create a custom URL structure for your published and archived posts, so your content can easily go from something that is non-SEO friendly like this …

Using Permalinks To Improve Your WordPress SEO

To this …

Improve Your WordPress SEO Using Permalinks

In this tutorial, you will learn how to configure the Permalinks section of your WordPress site to display posts using search engine-friendly URLs instead of the out-of-the-box URL structure and help every new post you add automatically get better indexing results in search engines like Google.

Setting Up Your WordPress Permalinks

Log into your WordPress dashboard and click on Settings > Permalinks

How To Configure Your WordPress Permalinks

This will bring you to the Permalink Settings screen …

Using Permalinks To Improve Your WordPress SEO

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 one set by default.

Permalinks > Common 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

(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/budget-cruises/river-cruise-holiday-deals

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=7680

Using permalinks helps readers understand what your post is about

(Using permalinks helps visitors and search engines understand what the content is about)

How To Create Pretty WordPress URLs

“Pretty” permalinks, or search engine-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. ‘2014’)
  • %monthnum% – The month your post is published (e.g. ‘06’)
  • %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘19’)
  • %hour% – The hour the post gets published (e.g. ‘04’)
  • %minute% – The minute the post is published (e.g. ‘20’)
  • %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘06’)
  • %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘3700’)
  • %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 letters converted to lower case and exclamation marks removed) in the URL. Tip: You can edit the wording in your post title 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 sanitized 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 …

Configuring Your WordPress Permalinks

Or, use one of the following structures:

How To Set Up Your WordPress Permalinks

Useful 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 …

Changing WordPress Permalinks

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

Optional Permalink Settings

Configuring Your WordPress Permalinks

This section lets you configure custom structures for your tag and category page URLs.

You can change the ‘base’ tag or category of your URLs using the following syntax:

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

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

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

Improve Your WordPress SEO With Permalinks

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

Improve Your WordPress SEO Using SEO-Friendly URLs

To something like this …

Improve Your WordPress SEO Using SEO-Friendly URLs

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

Remember to save any changes after you have finished …

How To Improve Your WordPress SEO With 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 – Additional Information

Set Up 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, 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 a few things 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 the category tag 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 copy or share 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 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 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 Time-Specific Permalink Syntax

Another useful tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your site provides news or time-specific information, or you have any special reason to create dated post URLs, it’s best to avoid choosing date-based permalink syntax when setting up your blog’s URLs.

Avoid setting up URL structures that date your content

(Avoid using URL structures that date your posts)

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 About Established Blogs?

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

Disclaimer

If your website is already established 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 absolutely something that needs to be done, as doing so could create issues and loss of traffic.

Use 301 Redirects

As you’ve seen in earlier screenshots, some WordPress site owners (or their web developers) are completely unaware of the SEO-friendly URLs feature of WordPress.

Maybe when you started, your site used the default WordPress permalinks and now you would like to improve your SEO. Maybe your website was configured to display post dates in your web address and now all of your content is perceived as being outdated and you want to delete the date tags of your URLs.

To modify your URL structure without negatively impacting your site’s SEO or existing rankings you should add ‘301 redirections’ to reassign links set up 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 relocated to another destination. 301 redirects are the most efficient and search engine friendly way to redirect visitors to new website destinations and avoid ”page not found” errors when they click on an old link.

To create an effective permalink structure change and avoid damaging your search rankings, sending visitors to broken links, etc. you should configure a redirection system before changing the permalink structure of your site.

You can WP site using a plugin like Simple 301 Redirects, or Redirection, or use the services of a professional to assist you with setting up and redirecting your permalinks correctly to avoid any issues and troubleshoot any errors.

Simple 301 Redirects - WordPress plugin

(Set up a redirection system using redirection plugins or get professional help)

Congratulations! Now you know how to configure your site to display SEO-friendly URLs for your posts. For additional information on using Permalinks, refer to the WordPress codex below:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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"I have used the tutorials to teach all of my clients and it has probably never been so easy for everyone to learn WordPress ... Now I don't need to buy all these very expensive video courses that often don't deliver what they promise." - Stefan Wendt, Internet Marketing Success Group