Wouldn’t it be great if you could publish a new post on your WordPress website or blog, and the following happened … all from your page URL:

• Site readers could glean what the page is about,
• Search engines would be able to find your posts faster,
• Each content item published on your site would have a unique identifier, making your content easier to manage.

Well, with permalinks you can!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – Definition

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

A permalink is the web address that people and search engines will use to link to articles or sections of your site or the links you send in emails pointing readers to content items on your site. Some people refer to permalinks as “pretty” URLs.

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

Permalinks – Why Use Them?

Hopefully, by now you probably know that, WordPress is one of the best CMS applications available when it comes to publishing search optimized content.

WordPress is not only well optimized straight out of the box, but its SEO aspect can be further fine tuned with excellent SEO plugins.

If you focus on the SEO aspect of your website, then you should not ignore the importance of your URLs. Google tends to pay special attention to the URL structure of a site.

Permalinks can be 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 the reason why you should use permalinks if publishing content in WordPress.

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

The above link structure is used by WordPress to find data within its database. It doesn’t really mean much to anyone, and it doesn’t help your site with on-site SEO.

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

Although these sites are getting their content indexed on search engines, they are potentially missing out on extra SEO benefits.

To get the maximum SEO benefit from using WordPress and improve your site’s rankings, you will want to make sure to configure 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 and archived posts, so your content can easily go from this …

To something with an SEO-friendly URL like this …

Out of the box, WordPress post URLs are not very SEO-friendly. In this tutorial, you will learn how to set up your permalinks in WordPress to display posts with SEO-friendly URLs.

Changing Your WordPress Permalinks

In your WordPress dashboard 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 search engine friendly URLs instead for our posts. To do this, we will need to specify a different Permalink structure than the one set by default.

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/travel-europe/cruise-holiday-bargains

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=5429

(Using permalinks helps readers understand what your content is about)

Using Permalink Tags In WordPress

“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 gets published, four digits (e.g. ‘2016’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘05’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘27’)
• %hour% – The hour the post gets published (e.g. ‘20’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘16’)
• %second% – The exact second your post gets published (e.g. ‘50’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘431’)
• %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 characters converted to lower case and exclamation marks removed) in the URL. Tip: You can 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 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 choosing the ‘Custom Structure’ option and using the /%postname%/ tag.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

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

This changes the ‘base’ category or tag for your URLs using the following syntax:

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

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

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

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

To something like this …

If you leave these fields blank the default settings 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 – Tips

Use Descriptive Categories

To get the most SEO 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 and author of the WordPress SEO plugin Joost de Valk, here are some points to consider if you are wondering whether you should add categories to your permalinks or not:

• 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 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.

Ultimately, when it comes to using category vs no category there is no ”better” permalink structure to use. Use a 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 provide more information about WordPress categories in another article.

Don’t Use Date Permalinks

Another tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your goal is to run a news blog or there is a special reason why you need to create dated post addresses, it’s best to avoid choosing date-based permalinks when setting up your URLs.

(Avoid setting up URL structures that date your posts)

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

What If My Blog Has Lots Of Content?

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

If your site has been running for a while or your site already has many posts indexed in the search engines and you would like to change the permalink structure, make sure that this is absolutely necessary, as doing so could create SEO issues and errors.

301 Redirection

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

Maybe you started out using the default WordPress permalinks and now you would like 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 two or three years old and you want to remove the date portion in your permalinks.

The best way to edit your URL structure without negatively affecting your site’s SEO or rankings is to use ‘301 redirects’ to reassign all links that use the previous URL syntax to page URLs using the new permalinks structure.

Search engines interpret a code ‘301’ as a link that has permanently relocated. 301 redirection is the most efficient and search engine friendly way to redirect visitors to new site destinations and avoid ”page not found” errors when clicking on an old link.

To effectively change your permalink structure and avoid SEO problems, sending visitors to broken links, etc. you will need to install and set up a redirection system before changing 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 get a professional to assist you with setting up and redirecting your permalinks correctly to avoid any problems and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up link redirections using a WordPress redirection plugin or get professional assistance)

Congratulations! Now you know how to change your WordPress site or blog permalinks to display SEO-friendly URLs for your posts. To learn more about using Permalinks, refer to the official WordPress documentation here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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