Wouldn’t it be great if after adding content to your WordPress website or blog, the following could take place … all from your web address:

• Visitors could quickly gain an understanding of what the content is about,
• Google would easily discover your post and correctly classify the content for better search results,
• Each post published on your website would have its own unique ID, making your content easier to manage.

Well, with permalinks this is really easy to do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – Definition

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 other people use to link to articles or sections of your site or the links you send in an email pointing to your posts. Permalinks are often called “pretty” URLs.

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

Why Do You Need To Use Permalinks?

As you are probably aware, WordPress is one of the best CMS tools you can use when it comes to SEO.

WordPress is not only well optimized straight out of the box, but there are excellent SEO plugins you can install that will help to finetune its SEO aspect further.

If you are looking to optimize the SEO aspect of your site, then you cannot ignore the importance of its URLs. Google tends to pay special attention to the structure of URLs when indexing pages.

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

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

The link structure shown above is used by WordPress to find data within your database. It does not help your site with on-site search engine optimization.

As you can see from the screenshot below taken directly from Google search results, many site owners haven’t yet set up their permalinks …

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

To get the best SEO benefit from using and improve your site’s traffic results, 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 offers the ability to create a custom URL structure for your published and archived posts, so your content can go from something that is non-SEO friendly like this …

To something with an SEO-friendly URL like this …

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

Setting Up Your WordPress Permalinks

In your WordPress admin section 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 search engine friendly URL instead for our posts. To do this, we will need to specify a different Permalink structure than the default one.

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 …

(Configure 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/travel-europe/five-favourite-european-river-cruises

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=160

(Using permalinks helps readers understand what the post is about)

How To Use Permalink Tags In WordPress

“Pretty” URLs, 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, four digits (e.g. ‘2017’)
• %monthnum% – The month the post gets published (e.g. ‘12’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘28’)
• %hour% – The hour your post gets published (e.g. ‘03’)
• %minute% – The minute your post is published (e.g. ‘21’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘58’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘3939’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of your post title. For example, if the 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 no punctuation symbols) in the URL. Tip: You can always edit this 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 …

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 choosing the ‘Custom Structure’ option and using the /%postname%/ tag.

Optional Permalink Settings

If you need to configure custom permalinks for your category and tag archive page URLs here is where you would do this.

You can change the ‘base’ category or tag for your 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” would display your category links as ‘http://domain.com/news/uncategorized/’.

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

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

To something like this …

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

Remember to save any 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 best possible SEO benefit from 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 plugin developer Joost de Valk, here are a few things to keep in mind if you are wondering whether you should add categories to your permalinks or not:

• 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 or share and reduce the SEO benefit.
• Do you plan to post content under only one category or multiple categories? 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.

Despite being the subject of intense debate in WordPress SEO circles, when it comes to category vs no category there is no perfect permalink structure to use. We recommend choosing the permalink structure you think will suit your needs best and that will make your post URLs short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We cover WordPress categories in other tutorials.

Don’t Use Date Permalinks

Another useful tip from Joost de Valk is that unless you run a news website or blog or there is a special reason why you need to add dates to your URLs, it’s best to avoid using date-based permalink syntax when setting up your blog’s URLs.

(Avoid setting up URL structures that date your content)

People are less likely to click on a post if it is several years old, even if the content is relevant to the answers they are searching for.

What If My Blog Has Published Posts?

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

If your website 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 something that absolutely needs doing, as changing permalinks after your site has already been going for a while can create SEO issues and loss of traffic.

Use 301 Redirection

As you’ve seen in the above screenshots of actual search results, many WordPress site owners (or whoever set up their site) seem to be unaware of the permalinks feature of WordPress.

Maybe when you started out, your site used the default WordPress URL structure and now you would like to improve your SEO. Perhaps your website was configured to display post dates in your web address and now all of your content is showing as being 2-3 years old and you want to remove the date portion of your permalinks.

To change your permalinks without negatively affecting your site’s SEO or rankings you should use ‘301 redirects’ to reassign all links that use the old permalink syntax to web addresses that use the new permalinks structure.

A ’301′ code is interpreted by search engines as a link that has permanently moved to another destination. 301 redirection is the most efficient and search engine friendly way to redirect visitors to new website destinations and avoid ”page not found” errors when clicking 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 WordPress 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 problems and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up link redirections using a WP plugin or use the services of a professional)

Congratulations! Now you know about the built-in system WordPress uses to display search engine-friendly URLs for your posts. For additional information on using Permalinks, see the WordPress codex below:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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