SEO Boss Blog

You might be asking yourself, what exactly is a permalink? Well, I am referring to a WordPress permalink. A permalink is defined in Wikiepedia as “A permalink, or permanent link, is a URL that points to a specific blog or forum entry after it has passed from the front page to the archives.” So what do I mean by the fact that I prefer using a custom permalink structure in WordPress? Continue reading to find out.

First, lets take a look at what the default URL will look like when you make a post in WordPress:

http://domain.com/?p=1

Now, how about for a static page in WordPress:

http://domain.com/?page_id=2

The URL’s are not search engine friendly at all. Remember, having the keyphrase you are going for inside your URL is excellent for search engine rankings. I said I prefer to custom this URL, in order to customize it you will be editing the “Permalinks” section of WordPress. So now you understand what I mean in the title of my post.

Anyways, so how would I suggest customizing your permalinks? I perfer to do something like this:

http://domain.com/category/post-title/

or

http://domain.com/post-title/

The page would look something like this:

http://domain.com/page-name/

You can see how doing this works and how it will improve your search engine rankings. So how do you do it? SIMPLE!

• FTP into your hosting account and find (or create) the .htaccess file. CHMOD it to 777
• Login to the Admin section of WordPress and click Settings on the left hand side.
• Scroll down and click Permalinks
• Under Common Settings select “Custom Structure” and put this code in the box: /%category%/%postname%/
• Click Save Changes
• Your .htaccess will be automatically updated.
• CHMOD your .htaccess back to 644

That’s it! You’ve now search engine optimized your wordpress blog URL’s. Give it some time for the search engines to recrawl your site and index the new URL’s.