Wouldn’t it be great if after publishing a new post on your website, the following happened … all from your post URL:

• Users could easily determine what your page is about,
• Search engines would discover your posts faster,
• Every single post published on your website would have a unique ID, making things easier to manage.

Well, with WordPress permalinks you can easily do this!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

What Is A Permalink?

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 other people use to link to articles or sections of your site or the links you send in an email pointing to your posts. Some people refer to permalinks as “pretty” URLs.

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

Why Use Permalinks?

Hopefully, you are probably aware by now that, WordPress is one of the best Content Management Systems you can use when it comes to publishing search engines optimized content.

WordPress is not only well optimized straight out of the box, but the SEO aspect can be easily finetuned using excellent SEO plugins.

If you are looking to optimize the SEO aspect of your site or blog, then you cannot ignore the importance of its URLs. Google tends to give special consideration to the URL structure of your site.

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

Now … let’s turn our attention to why you should use permalinks if publishing content in WordPress.

Normally, 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 locate data inside your 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 taken from Google search listings below shows, many site owners are still using out of the box settings when publishing content …

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

To get more SEO benefit from using WordPress and improve your site’s rankings, you should set up your permalinks structure to make it more SEO-friendly by displaying relevant keywords in your URL, instead of meaningless characters.

WordPress offers you the ability to create a custom URL structure for your published posts, so your content can go from this …

To something like this …

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

Setting Up WordPress Permalinks

In your WP admin 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 a search engine friendly URL 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 SEO-friendly URLs …

(Change your permalink settings to create SEO-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/how-to-save-money-on-cruise-travel

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=8150

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

SEO-Friendly Tags

“Pretty” URLs, 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. ‘2015’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘09’)
• %day% – The day the post is published (e.g. ‘07’)
• %hour% – The hour your post is published (e.g. ‘03’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘13’)
• %second% – The exact second the post gets published (e.g. ‘21’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘5068’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted version of your post title. For example, if your post title is ”It Ain’t Worth Doin’ No More!”, the postname tag will convert this into “it-aint-worth-doin-no-more” (all lower case characters and no exclamation marks) in the URL. Tip: You can edit the wording in your post titles 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 structures for your category and tag pages you can do this in this section.

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

• 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 make the following change in your permalinks Optional > Category base settings field …

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

To this …

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

Remember to save your changes when 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 Info

Use Short, Descriptive Categories

To get the optimal benefit out of 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 Joost de Valk, here are some things to consider if you are wondering whether or not to add categories to your permalinks:

• 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 copy or share and reduce 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.

Despite being the subject of intense debate in WordPress SEO circles, when it comes to adding category vs no category there is no ”better” permalink structure to use. Choose the 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 another article.

Avoid Date-Based Permalinks

Another great tip from Joost de Valk is that unless you run a news site or you have a special reason to add dates to your post URLs, it’s best to avoid choosing date-based permalink settings when setting up your URLs.

(Avoid setting up URL structures that time-stamp your content)

Although setting up permalinks that date your content may be considered better that using no permalinks at all from an SEO aspect, visitors are less likely to click on posts that are a couple of years old, even if the content is relevant to what they are searching for.

What If My Blog Already Has Content?

Normally, it’s best to set up your site’s permalinks when you perform a new WordPress installation. This should be part of your website planning process.

If your website or blog is already established 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 something that needs to be done, as doing so could create SEO issues and errors.

Add 301 Redirects

As you’ve seen in earlier screenshots, some WordPress users (or whoever set up their site) seem to be completely unaware of the permalinks feature of WordPress.

Maybe you started out using the default WordPress URL structure and now you would like to optimize your site better for search engines. Maybe your website was originally set up to display post dates in your web address and now all of your posts are perceived as being outdated and you want to remove the date tags of your URLs.

To modify your permalinks without affecting your site’s SEO in a negative way you should add ‘301 redirections’ to reassign links set up using the previous URL structure to links using the new permalink syntax.

Search engines interpret a code ‘301’ as a link that has been permanently relocated to another destination. 301 redirection is the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect users to new website destinations and avoid running into ”page not found” errors if they click on an old link.

To create an effective permalink syntax change and avoid damaging your search rankings, sending visitors to error pages, etc. you should install and set up your redirection system before messing with the permalink structure of your site.

You can add a link redirection system to your do this using a redirection plugin like Simple 301 Redirects, or Redirection, or get a professional to assist you with setting up and redirecting your permalinks correctly to avoid any issues and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up 301 redirects using redirection plugins 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 and improve your search results. To learn more about using Permalinks, refer to the WordPress codex below:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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