Wouldn’t it be great if you could just publish content on your WordPress website or blog, and the following happened … just from your web address:

• Site visitors could easily gain an understanding of what your page was about,
• Search engines could easily find your page and correctly classify its content to improve your search rankings,
• Every single post added to your site would have a unique ID, making your content easier to manage.

Well, this is what WordPress permalinks let you do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

What’s A Permalink?

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

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

Permalinks make the URL pointing to each post on your site permanent, hence a permalink.

Why 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 the SEO aspect can be considerably fine tuned with SEO plugins.

If you are looking to optimize the SEO aspect of your site, then you should not ignore the importance of its URLs. Google tends to pay special attention to the URL structure of your site.

Permalinks can be used to make the links on your site into memorable and more “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 set up permalinks when publishing content in WordPress.

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

WordPress uses the link structure shown above to find information inside its database. It doesn’t really help your website with on-site SEO.

As you can see from the image below, many WordPress site owners haven’t configured their permalinks …

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

To get greater SEO benefit out of using and improve your site’s traffic results, you will want to make sure to set up your permalinks structure to make it more search engine-friendly by displaying relevant keywords in your URL, instead of meaningless characters.

WordPress allows you to create a custom URL structure for your published posts, so your pages can easily go from something that is non-SEO friendly like this …

To this …

Out of the box, WordPress post URLs are not very search engine-friendly. In this tutorial, you will learn how to configure the Permalinks section of your WordPress site to automatically get better indexing results in Google.

Changing Your WordPress Permalinks

In your WordPress admin click on, Settings > Permalinks …

This brings you to 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

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/travel-tips/romantic-cruise-holiday-bargains

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=181

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

Pretty Permalink Tags

“Pretty” URLs, or SEO-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. ‘2017’)
• %monthnum% – The month your post is published (e.g. ‘05’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘09’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘10’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘32’)
• %second% – The exact second your post is published (e.g. ‘04’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘8944’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of your 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 letters and exclamation marks deleted) in the URL. Tip: You can always edit this wording 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’ setting and using the /%postname%/ tag.

Optional Permalink Settings

In this section, you can set custom structures for your tag and category archive pages.

This changes the ‘base’ category or tag URLs using the following structure:

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

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

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

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

To this …

If you leave these fields blank WordPress uses the default settings.

Remember to save any 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 – Additional Notes

Use Short, Descriptive Categories

To get greater 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 expert and author of the WordPress SEO plugin Joost de Valk, here are a few things to consider if you are wondering whether you should add categories to your permalinks or not:

• If your category name is short and descriptive (e.g. adds a relevant keyword or keyword phrase to your URL), you may want to use the category tag 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 reduce the SEO benefit.
• 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 is no ideal permalink structure to use. Choose the permalink structure that you think will suit your site best. Many SEO experts and webmasters recommend making your post URLs short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We cover WordPress categories in another article.

Avoid Using Date-Based URLs

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

(Avoid using permalinks that time-stamp your content)

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

What If My Site Already Has Indexed Posts?

Normally, it’s best to configure your permalinks when you first install WordPress. 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 would like to change the permalink structure, make sure that this is something that absolutely needs doing, as doing so can create issues and errors.

Use 301 Redirection

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

Maybe you started out using the default WordPress permalinks and now you would like to improve your SEO. Maybe your website or blog was originally set up to display post dates in your URLs and now all of your content is showing as being two or three years old and you want to delete the date tags in the permalinks.

The best way to change your URL structure without negatively affecting your site’s SEO or rankings is to add ‘301 redirects’ to point all links that use the previous URL structure to web addresses using the new structure.

A ’301′ code is interpreted by search engines as a link that has been permanently moved elsewhere. 301 redirection is the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect users to new website destinations and avoid ”page not found” errors if they click on an old link.

To effectively change your permalink syntax and avoid damaging your rankings, sending visitors to broken links, etc. you will need to install and set up your redirection system before changing the permalink structure of your site.

You can site or blog using WordPress redirection plugins 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.

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

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

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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