Wouldn’t it be great if after adding a new page to your WordPress site, the following took place … all from your web address:

• Site readers could tell what your page was about,
• Google would be able to easily discover your pages and correctly index their content for better search results,
• Each content item on your website or blog would have its own unique ID, making things easier to manage.

Well, with permalinks you can easily do this!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

What Is A Permalink?

Permalinks are the permanent URLs to your individual posts, categories and other taxonomies (a way to group things together) like archives.

A permalink is the URL that people and search engines use to link to your articles or sections of your site or the links you send in an email pointing readers to a specific item of content on your blog. Permalinks are often referred to as “pretty” URLs.

Permalinks make the URLs to each post on your website 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 publishing search optimized content.

WordPress is not only great for SEO out of the box, but there are excellent SEO plugins you can install that will help to enhance its SEO aspect further.

If you focus on the SEO aspect of your site, then you cannot ignore the importance of your site’s URLs. Google places considerable weight on the structure of a site’s URLs when indexing site pages.

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

Now … let’s turn our attention to why you may need to set up permalinks in WordPress.

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

WordPress uses the above link structure with a string query to find information inside its database. It does not help your website with on-site SEO.

As the screenshot image below shows, many WordPress site owners are still using default settings when publishing content …

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

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

WordPress offers the ability to create a custom URL structure for your published and archived posts, so your content can easily 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 your WordPress permalinks to display posts using SEO-friendly URLs instead of the out-of-the-box linking structure and help every new post you publish get better indexing results in Google.

Setting Up Your WordPress Permalinks

In your WordPress dashboard area select, Settings > Permalinks …

This will bring 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 a “pretty” permalink instead for our posts. To do this, we will need to specify a different Permalink structure than the default one.

Common Settings – Permalinks

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 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/cruise-travel/river-cruise-holiday-deals

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=3046

(Using post name permalinks helps visitors understand what your post is about)

How To Add SEO-Friendly Tags In Custom Structure

“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, displayed as four digits (e.g. ‘2015’)
• %monthnum% – The month the post gets published (e.g. ‘10’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘05’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘14’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘52’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘23’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘6808’)
• %postname% – A sanitized 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 removed punctuation marks) in the URL. Tip: You can edit the words in your post title 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 ‘Custom Structure’ and using the /%postname%/ tag.

Optional Permalink Settings

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

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 “topics” as your category base will make your category links display as ‘http://domain.com/topics/category_name/’.

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

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

To something like this …

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

Remember to save your changes after you have 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 – Additional Information

Use Descriptive Categories

To get more benefit out of using Permalinks, you will need 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 a few points to consider if you are wondering whether you should add categories to your permalink structure or not:

• If your category slug 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 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 adding category vs no category there is no ideal permalink structure to use. Choose the permalink structure you think will suit your site best. Many SEO experts and webmasters recommend making your web addresses short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We cover WordPress categories in other articles.

Avoid Using Date-Based URLs

Another useful tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your aim is to run a news site or you have any special reason to create dated website addresses, avoid using date-based permalink options when configuring your blog’s URLs.

(Avoid setting up permalinks that date your content)

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

What If My Site Has Lots Of Indexed Content?

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

If your website is already established 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 really necessary, as doing so can create issues and loss of traffic.

301 Redirection

As you’ve seen earlier, many website owners (or whoever set up their site) seem to be unaware of the SEO-friendly URLs feature of WordPress.

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

To change your URL structure without negatively impacting your site’s SEO you will need to add ‘301 redirects’ to point all links that were set up using the old permalink syntax to URLs that use the new permalink structure.

A code ‘301’ is interpreted by search engines as a link that has permanently been relocated. 301 redirects are the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect users to new site destinations and avoid page errors when following an old link.

To create an effective syntax change and avoid SEO problems, sending visitors to broken links, etc. you should install and set up a redirection system before messing with the permalink structure of your site.

You can add a link redirection system to your do this using 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 a redirection system 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 and improve your search results. For additional information on using Permalinks, refer to the official WordPress documentation below:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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