Wouldn’t it be great if you could simply publish content on your WordPress website, and the following took place … just from your URL:

• Readers could glean what your content is about,
• Search engines could discover your posts faster,
• Every single item of content you create on your site would have a unique ID, making things easier to manage.

Well, this is what permalinks let you do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalink – What Is It?

Permalinks are the permanent URLs 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 articles or sections of your site or the links you send in an email pointing to your posts. Permalinks are sometimes referred to as “pretty” URLs.

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

Permalinks – Why Do You Need To Use Them?

As you have probably heard by now, WordPress is one of the best CMS tools you can use when it comes to publishing search optimized content.

WordPress is not only great for SEO out of the box, but the SEO aspect can be easily finetuned using excellent SEO plugins.

If you focus on the SEO aspect of your site, then you cannot ignore the importance of its URLs. Google tends to give special consideration to the URL structure of your site.

Permalinks can be used to turn 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 take a look at why it’s best to configure your permalinks in WordPress.

By default, a 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 within its database. It doesn’t really mean much to anyone, and it doesn’t help your site with on-site search engine optimization.

As you can see from the screenshot below taken from Google search listings, many WordPress users haven’t configured their sites to use permalinks …

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

To get the best SEO benefit from using 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 you the ability to create a custom URL structure for your published posts, so your pages can easily go from something that is non-SEO friendly like this …

To something like this …

In this tutorial, you will learn how to configure the Permalinks section of your WordPress site 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.

Configuring WordPress Permalinks

In your WordPress admin 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 search engine friendly URL instead for our posts. To do this, we 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 search engine-friendly URLs …

(Configure 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/budget-cruises/five-favourite-european-cruise-destinations

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=7243

(Using permalinks helps search engines and visitors understand what the content is about)

Creating 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 your post is published, four digits (e.g. ‘2016’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘06’)
• %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘06’)
• %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘16’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘01’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘18’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘2723’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted version of your post title. For example, if your 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 exclamation marks deleted) in the URL. Tip: You can edit the URL wording 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 configure custom structures for your tag and category archive page URLs.

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

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

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

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

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

To something like this …

If you leave the optional settings 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 – Additional Notes

Use Descriptive Categories

To get the most SEO 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 plugin developer Joost de Valk, here are some things 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. adds a relevant keyword or keyword phrase to your URL), 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 copy or share and reduce 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 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 site’s web addresses short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We provide more information about WordPress categories in another tutorial.

Avoid Date-Based Permalinks

Another useful tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your website provides news, or you have a special reason to add dates to your URLs, avoid using date-based permalink syntax when setting up your URLs.

(Avoid using permalinks that date your posts)

Although setting up URL structures that time-stamp your posts is better that using no permalinks at all from an SEO perspective, visitors 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.

What If My Blog Has Content?

Normally, your permalinks should be set up when you perform a new WordPress installation. This should be part of your site planning process.

If your website has been running for a while 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 absolutely necessary, as doing so could create SEO issues and errors.

Add 301 Redirection

As you’ve seen earlier, some WordPress site owners (or their web developers) 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. Maybe your website was originally set up to display post dates in your URLs and now all of your posts are perceived as being out-of-date and you want to remove the date portion in the URLs.

The best way to change your URL structure without negatively impacting your site’s SEO is to use ‘301 redirects’ to reassign all links that use the previous permalinks syntax to web URLs that use the new permalink structure.

A code ‘301’ is interpreted by search engines as a link that has permanently been relocated to another destination. 301 redirects are the most efficient and search engine friendly way to redirect visitors to new website destinations and avoid ‘404’ (Page not found) errors if clicking on an old link.

To create an effective permalink structure change and avoid SEO problems, sending visitors to broken links, etc. you will need to configure a redirection system before changing the permalink structure of your site.

You can site using a redirection plugin 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 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 search engine-friendly URLs for your posts. To learn more about using Permalinks, refer to the WordPress codex here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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