Wouldn’t it be great if after publishing content on your WordPress site, the following could happen … all from your post address:

• Potential visitors could easily glean what your content was about,
• Search engines could find your pages faster,
• Each item of content you create on your website would have a unique identifier, making things easier to manage.

Well, this is what a WordPress permalink lets you do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – Definition

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 people and search engines will use to link to your articles or sections of your site or the links you send in an email pointing readers to a particular item of content on your site. Some people refer to permalinks as “pretty” URLs.

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

Why Use Permalinks?

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

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

If you focus on the SEO aspect of your site, then you cannot ignore the importance of your URLs. Search engines like Google place considerable weight on 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 are also used to improve the usability, aesthetics, and forward-compatibility of your links.

Now … let’s see why you may need to use permalinks in WordPress.

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

The link structure shown above is used by WordPress to locate information inside its database. It does not help your site with on-site SEO.

As you can see from the image below taken from Google search results, many site owners haven’t yet configured their sites to publish search optimized content online …

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

To get the maximum SEO benefit out of 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 numbers and symbols.

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

To something with an SEO-friendly URL like this …

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

How To Change WordPress Permalinks

Log into your WP admin and 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 “pretty” permalink instead for our posts. To do this, we need to specify a different Permalink structure than the default one.

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)

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=8944

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

WordPress Permalink Tags

“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 is published, displayed as four digits (e.g. ‘2015’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘07’)
• %day% – The day the post gets published (e.g. ‘29’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘16’)
• %minute% – The minute your post is published (e.g. ‘60’)
• %second% – The exact second the post is published (e.g. ‘10’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘7416’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted version of the 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 characters converted to lower case and removed punctuation symbols) in the URL. Tip: You can always edit the words in your post titles 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 adding the /%postname%/ tag in ‘Custom Structure’.

Optional Permalink Settings

If you need to configure custom structures for your category and tag archive pages you can do this in this section.

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

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

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

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

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

To something like this …

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

Remember to save any changes after 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 Descriptive Categories

To get more benefit from using Permalinks, remember 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 and author of the WordPress SEO plugin Joost de Valk, here are some points to consider if you are wondering whether or not to add categories to your permalinks:

• If your domain is short and your category is short and descriptive (e.g. uses a relevant keyword or keyword phrase), 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 share and decrease the SEO benefit.
• If you are going 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 ”better” permalink structure to use. We recommend choosing the permalink structure you think will suit your site best and that will make your web address short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We cover WordPress categories in another tutorial.

Create Timeless Posts

Another useful tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your website provides news or time-specific information, or you have any special reason to date your site’s content, avoid using date-based permalink settings for your site’s URLs.

(Avoid setting up URL structures that date your posts)

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

Changing Permalinks In Site With Published Content

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

If your website or blog is already established or your site already has many posts indexed in the search engines and you want to change the permalink structure, make sure that this is absolutely necessary, as doing so could create issues and loss of traffic.

Add 301 Redirection

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

Maybe you started out using the default WordPress permalinks and now you want to improve your site’s SEO. Perhaps your site was configured to display post dates in your web address and now all of your posts are showing as being 2-3 years old and you want to remove the date portion in the permalinks.

The best way to change your permalink structure without negatively impacting your site’s SEO or existing rankings is to use ‘301 redirections’ to reassign all links that were set up using the previous permalinks syntax to links that use the new structure.

Search engines interpret a ’301′ code as a link that has permanently moved. 301 redirection is the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect visitors to new web page destinations and avoid running into ‘404’ (Page not found) errors if they click on an old link.

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

You can site or blog using a WP plugin like Simple 301 Redirects, or Redirection, or use the services of a professional to help you set up and redirect your permalinks correctly to avoid any problems and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up URL redirections using redirection 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. To learn more about using Permalinks, see the official WordPress documentation below:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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