Wouldn’t it be great if you could add a new post to your WordPress website, and the following happened … all from your page address:

• Users could easily understand what the page is about,
• Google would be able to easily discover your page and correctly classify the content to improve your search results,
• Every single post published on your site would have its own unique identifier, making your site 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 your individual posts, categories and other taxonomies (a way to group things together) like archives.

A permalink is the web address that others will use to link to your posts or sections of your site or the links you send in emails pointing readers to your posts. Permalinks are often called “pretty” URLs.

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

Why Use Permalinks?

As you are probably aware, WordPress is one of the best CMS tools you can use when it comes to SEO.

WordPress is not only well optimized straight out of the box, but there are excellent SEO plugins you can use that will help to fine tuned its SEO aspect.

If you are looking to optimize the SEO aspect of your site, then you should not ignore the importance of your site’s URLs. Search engines like Google place considerable weight on the structure of a site’s URLs when indexing site pages.

Permalinks are used to turn links on your site into memorable and more “search engine friendly” URLs. Permalinks also 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.

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

WordPress uses the above link with a string query to locate data within its database. It does not mean anything to visitors or search engines, and it doesn’t help your site with on-site SEO.

As the screenshot below shows, many WordPress site owners haven’t yet configured their permalinks …

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

To get greater SEO benefit out of using WordPress and improve your site’s traffic results, you should configure your permalinks structure to make it more search engine-friendly by displaying relevant keywords in your URL, instead of meaningless numbers and symbols.

WordPress gives you the ability to create a custom URL structure for your published 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 configure your WordPress permalinks to display posts with search engine-friendly URLs instead of the default URL structure and help every new post you publish get better indexing in search engines.

Setting Up WordPress Permalinks

From your WordPress admin menu, click on 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 “pretty” permalinks instead for our posts. To do this, we need to specify a different Permalink structure than the default one.

Common Permalink Settings

In the Common Settings section, select Custom Structure, then add one or more ‘tags’ (see below) to create SEO-friendly URLs …

(Configure 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/3-favourite-european-river-cruises

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=7240

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

How To Create Search Engine-Friendly 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 your post is published, displayed as four digits (e.g. ‘2016’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘06’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘28’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘16’)
• %minute% – The minute your post gets published (e.g. ‘35’)
• %second% – The exact second the post gets published (e.g. ‘46’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘6557’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted version of your post title. For example, if the post title is ”Ten Best Hotels In Cote D’Azur!”, the postname tag will convert this into “ten-best-hotels-in-cote-dazur” (all lower case letters and no punctuation marks) in the URL. Tip: You can edit the URL text 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.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

Here you can set up custom structures for your tag and category pages.

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

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

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

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

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

To this …

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

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 – Additional Info

Use Short, Descriptive Categories

To get the most benefit from 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 a few points to keep in mind if you are wondering whether or not to add categories to your permalinks:

• If your domain is short and your category name 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 decrease the SEO benefit.
• 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 using category vs no category there really is no ideal permalink structure to use. Use a permalink structure that you think will suit your needs best. Your post URLs should be short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We cover WordPress categories in other articles.

Make Your Posts Timeless

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

(Avoid setting up permalinks that date your content)

Although using URL structures that time-stamp your content is better that using no permalinks at all from an SEO perspective, visitors are less likely to click on a post if it is several years old, even if the content is relevant to what they are searching for.

What About Changing Permalinks In An Established Blog?

Normally, your permalinks should be set up 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 a lot of content indexed in the search engines and you would like to change the permalink structure, make sure that this is absolutely something that needs to be done, as doing so could create issues and errors.

Add 301 Redirects

As you’ve seen in the above screenshots of actual search results, many site owners (or their web developers) are unaware of the SEO-friendly URLs feature of WordPress.

Maybe you started out using the default WordPress permalinks and now you would like to optimize your site better for search engines. Maybe your site was configured to display post dates in your URLs and now all of your posts are perceived as being outdated and you want to remove the date tags of your URLs.

The best way to change your permalink structure without affecting your site’s SEO or existing rankings in a negative way is to add ‘301 redirects’ to point all links set up using the old URL syntax to links using the new permalinks syntax.

Search engines interpret a ’301′ code as a link that has 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 ‘404’ (Page not found) errors when clicking on an old link.

To effectively change your permalink syntax and avoid damaging your search rankings, sending visitors to error pages, etc. you will need to 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 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 issues and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up 301 redirects using redirection plugins or use the services of a professional)

Congratulations! Now you know how to change your WordPress site to display SEO-friendly URLs for your posts and improve your search results. For additional information on using Permalinks, refer to the WordPress codex below:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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