How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Learn how to set up permalinks in WordPress for improved content navigation and better search engine optimization …

Configuring WordPress Permalinks

Wouldn’t it be great if after publishing new content on your website or blog, the following could take place … all from your post address:

  • Site readers could determine what your page is about,
  • Google could discover your pages faster,
  • Every post created on your site would have its own unique identifier, making your site easier to manage.

Well, this is what WordPress permalinks let you do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – What Are They?

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 others use to link to articles or sections of your site or the links you send in an email pointing to posts on your site. Some people also call permalinks “pretty” URLs.

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

Permalinks – Why Use Them?

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

WordPress is not only well optimized straight out of the box, but its SEO aspect can be considerably finetuned using excellent SEO plugins.

If you focus on the SEO aspect of your site or blog, then you should not ignore the importance of its site’s URLs. Search engines like Google place considerable weight on the structure of URLs when indexing site pages.

Permalinks can be used to turn links on your site into memorable and more “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 the reason why you should use permalinks when publishing content in WordPress.

By default, a WordPress installation uses a URL structure for your posts that isn’t search engine friendly and looks like this …

Using Permalinks To Improve Your WordPress SEOWordPress uses the link structure with a string query shown above to locate information within its database. It does not help your site with on-site search engine optimization.

As the screenshot below shows, many site owners haven’t configured their permalinks to publish search optimized content …

Using Permalinks To Improve Your WordPress SEO

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

To get the greatest SEO benefit from using 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 numbers and symbols.

WordPress offers the ability to create a custom URL structure for your published and archived posts, so your pages can easily go from something that is non-SEO friendly like this …

Improve Your WordPress SEO With SEO-Friendly URLs

To something like this …

Improve Your WordPress SEO With Permalinks

Out of the box, WordPress URLs are not very search engine-friendly. This step-by-step tutorial explains how to set up your WordPress permalinks to help you get better indexing in search engines.

Configuring WordPress Permalinks

In your WordPress admin select, Settings > Permalinks

Configuring WordPress Permalinks

This will bring up the Permalink Settings screen …

Changing WordPress Permalinks

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

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

Set up your permalink settings 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/romantic-cruise-holiday-deals

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=2549

Using post name permalinks helps readers understand what the content is about

(Using post name permalinks helps visitors and search engines understand what the page 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 of the post, four digits (e.g. ‘2014’)
  • %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘01’)
  • %day% – The day your post is published (e.g. ‘26’)
  • %hour% – The hour your post is published (e.g. ‘10’)
  • %minute% – The minute your post gets published (e.g. ‘08’)
  • %second% – The exact second the post gets published (e.g. ‘46’)
  • %post_id% – The unique ID # of your 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 no punctuation symbols) in the URL. Tip: You can edit this 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 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 …

Improve Your WordPress SEO Using Permalinks

Or, use one of the following structures:

Changing Your WordPress Permalinks

Tip

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 …

Using Permalinks To Improve Your WordPress SEO

Choosing ‘Post name’ is the same as selecting the ‘Custom Structure’ setting and using the /%postname%/ tag.

Permalinks – Optional Settings

How To Improve Your WordPress SEO Using Permalinks

This section lets you set up custom structures for your category and tag archive page URLs.

This changes 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 “recipes” will display your category links as ‘http://domain.com/recipes/category_name/’.

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

Improve Your WordPress SEO With SEO-Friendly URLs

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

How To Set Up Your WordPress Permalinks

To this …

Using Permalinks To Improve Your WordPress SEO

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

Remember to save your changes when you have finished …

Improve Your WordPress SEO With Permalinks

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

Set Up Your Categories

To get the most SEO benefit from 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 some points to keep in mind 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. uses a relevant keyword or keyword phrase), 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 copy or share 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.

Despite being the subject of intense debate in WordPress SEO circles, when it comes to using category vs no category there is no ”better” permalink structure to use. Choose a permalink structure 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.

Avoid Time-Specific URLs

Another useful tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your website provides news, or you have a special reason to date your content, it’s best to avoid selecting date-based permalink syntax for your blog’s URLs.

Avoid setting up URL structures that date your content

(Avoid setting up URL structures that time-stamp your posts)

Visitors are less likely to click on posts that are several years old, even if the content is relevant to the answers they are searching for.

Changing Your Permalink Structure In Site With Published Posts

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

Disclaimer

If your website 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 something that absolutely needs doing, as doing so can create issues and loss of traffic.

Add 301 Redirects

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

Maybe when you started, your site used the default WordPress permalinks and now you would like to optimize your site better for search engines. Perhaps your site was configured to display post dates in your URLs and now all of your content is perceived as being outdated and you want to delete the date tags of the URLs.

To change your permalinks without impacting your site’s SEO in a negative way you will need to add ‘301 redirects’ to reassign all links that were set up using the previous URL structure to post URLs using the new permalinks syntax.

A code ‘301’ is interpreted by search engines as a link that has permanently been moved to another location. 301 redirection is the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect visitors to new website destinations and avoid running into ‘404’ (Page not found) 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 your redirection system before messing with the permalink structure of your site.

You can site or blog using a redirection 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 problems and troubleshoot any errors.

Simple 301 Redirects - WordPress redirection plugin

(Set up 301 redirects using plugins or get professional assistance)

Congratulations! Now you know about the built-in system WordPress uses to display search engine-friendly URLs for your posts and improve your search search rankings. To learn more about using Permalinks, see the WordPress codex here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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"If you're new to WordPress, this can stand on its own as a training course and will stay with you as you progress from beginner to advanced and even guru status." - Bruce (Columbus, Ohio)

Originally published as How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks.