Wouldn’t it be great if you could publish a new page on your site, and the following took place … just from your page address:

• New visitors could easily determine what your post was about,
• Google would be able to easily find your post and correctly classify its content to improve your search rankings,
• Every single content item added to your site would have a unique identifier, making things easier to manage.

Well, with WordPress permalinks you can!

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 web address that other people will use to link to your posts or sections of your site or the links you send in an email pointing to a specific post on your site. Permalinks are often called “pretty” URLs.

Permalinks make the web address pointing to each post on your blog permanent, hence a perma-link.

Permalinks – Why Use Them?

As you have probably heard by now, WordPress is one of the best CMS tools available when it comes to SEO.

WordPress is not only great for SEO out of the box, but its SEO aspect can be easily enhanced 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 place considerable weight on the URL structure of your site.

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

Now … let’s see the reason why it’s best to use permalinks when publishing content in WordPress.

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

WordPress uses the link structure shown above to find information inside your database. It does not mean anything to either visitors or search engines, and it doesn’t help your website with on-site search engine optimization.

As you can see from the screenshot below, many WordPress users are still using out of the box settings when publishing their content …

Although Google is clearly still indexing the above sites, many site owners are missing out on extra SEO benefits.

To get optimal SEO benefit out of using WordPress and improve your site’s rankings, 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 lets you create a custom URL structure for your published posts, so your pages can easily go from this …

To this …

In this tutorial, you will learn how to set up your WordPress permalinks to display your posts with search engine-friendly URLs instead of the default URL structure and help every new post you publish automatically get better indexing in search engines.

Setting Up WordPress Permalinks

In your WordPress admin area select, Settings > Permalinks …

This will bring 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 will need to specify a different Permalink structure than the default.

Common Settings

In the Common Settings section, select Custom Structure, then add one or more ‘tags’ (see below) to create search engine-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/europe-cruises/cruise-holiday-bargains

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=9160

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

WordPress Permalink 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, displayed as four digits (e.g. ‘2018’)
• %monthnum% – The month the post is published (e.g. ‘05’)
• %day% – The day the post gets published (e.g. ‘05’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘10’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘36’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘06’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘3653’)
• %postname% – A sanitized version of your post title. For example, if the 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 letters and exclamation marks removed) in the URL. Tip: You can always 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 …

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 the ‘Custom Structure’ setting.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

Here you can set custom structures for your category and tag page URLs.

You can change the ‘base’ category or tag of 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 “topics” will make your category links display as ‘http://domain.com/topics/category_name/’.

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

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

To this …

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

Remember to save any 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 – Tips

Categories

To get the best possible SEO benefit from using Permalinks, you will need 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 points to keep in mind if you are wondering whether you should add categories to your permalinks or not:

• If your domain is short and your category name is short and descriptive (e.g. uses a relevant keyword or keyword phrase), you may want to add categories 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.
• 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 using category vs no category there is no ideal permalink structure to use. Choose the permalink structure that you think will suit your site best. Your web addresses should be short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We cover WordPress categories in another article.

Avoid Using Time-Stamping Permalinks

Another great tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your site is a news site or there is a special reason why you need to create dated web addresses, it’s best to avoid selecting date-based permalink options when setting up your blog’s URLs.

(Avoid setting up permalinks that date your content)

Although using permalinks that time-stamp your content may be considered 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 Your Permalink Structure In An Established Site

Normally, it’s best to set up your 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 a lot of posts 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 changing permalinks after your site has been running for a while can create SEO issues and errors.

Add 301 Redirects

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

Maybe when you started, your site used the default WordPress URL structure and now you would like to improve your site’s SEO. Perhaps your website was originally set up to display post dates in your web address and now all of your content is showing as being two or three years old and you want to delete the date portion in your permalinks.

To change your permalink structure without affecting your site’s SEO in a negative way you will need to add ‘301 redirections’ to point all links that were set up using the previous permalink structure to destinations that use the new syntax.

A code ‘301’ is interpreted by search engines as a link that has permanently relocated to another address. 301 redirects are the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect users to new site destinations and avoid running into ”page not found” errors when following an old link.

To effectively change your permalink structure and avoid damaging your search rankings, sending visitors to error pages, etc. you will need to 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 plugin like Simple 301 Redirects, or Redirection, or get a professional to assist you with setting up and redirecting your permalinks correctly to avoid issues and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up link redirections using plugins or get professional assistance)

Congratulations! Now you know how to change your WordPress site or blog to display SEO-friendly URLs for your posts and improve your search search rankings. For additional information on using Permalinks, see the official WordPress documentation below:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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