SEOGuruz.Com

Now we know the importance of Permalinks in WordPress Blogs. Restructuring Permalinks is pretty easy if we follow some simple and easy steps. We can find Permalinks Link in WordPress Settings. Clicking on Permalinks we will get the Options, and select the option “Custom Structure”. Enter the selected permalink structure there.

Permalink Structures are like

“/Category/Postname”

“/YYYY/MM/DD/PostName”

“/Category/PostName”

Enter the above code and don not press the “Save Changes” button. We need to have one more step to follow. We need to modify the file “.htaccess” which is located on our hosting server where the WordPress Blog is installed. Check the root where the main domain of your site is located for “.htaccess”, if available then change its “Permission mode” to “777”. If the file is not available then create an empty note pad and name it as “.htaccess” and upload it to the root where your main domain is placed. Change its “Permission mode” to “777”. This can be easily done by just right click on the fine and change the attributes. Most of the FTP clients or File Manager of your Host will allow right click on the files.

Now again go back to your Permalinks Section and click on “Save Changes” button. That’s it, you are done with the changes. Check your blog for verification. Don’t forget to change the file attributes to safe mode like “660” or “644” after the process.

Happy Blogging

Every WebMaster or Blog Owner wants more and more traffic coming from Search Engines. Every Blogger will try hard to maintain the quality content with nice descriptive Categories which allow Search Engines to crawl the Websites and keep up the high ranking. A Search Engine Friendly URL Structure will definitely boost up the better rankings.

When WordPress is installed by default the URL structure is like “http://ursite.com/?p=N” Where “N” is the Post ID like 123, 345 etc. and doesn’t look nice and very hard to remember and revisiting the site. IF the URL is made of words related to the content of the post instead of ugly default structure it would be easier to remember for visitors and most importantly useful for Search Engines with more information. Such Words in URLs can be seen highlighted or bold in search results.

WordPress.com users need not to worry in this case as their Blog’s URL Structure is well SEOed by WordPress. WordPress.Org users can make their URL Structure by Using Permalinks. One can select one of the three options provided by WordPress or we can choose a Custom Structure.

The options at Permalink Settings are;

Day and name http://ursite.com/2009/02/28/sample-post/

Month and name http://ursite.com/2009/02/28/sample-post/

Numeric http://ursite.com/archives/123

Custom Structure <Will be a blank, need to be filled as per our choice>

We can select one of the options or can use or own customized Structure. We can customize like;

http://ursite.com/Category/PostTitle

http://ursite.com/Year/month/day/PostTitle

http://ursite.com/postTitle

And this can be achieved by typing the below code in the Custom Structure

/%category/%postname%/

/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/

/%postname%/  etc.

We tested many customized Structures for my websites and for my Clients Websites. Some of them are;

“/Category/Postname”

“/YYYY/MM/DD/PostName”

“/Category/PostName”

“/YYYY/MM/DD/Category/Postname”

To test the results with the Search Engines. The test results always varied for different Websites. For one of the websites which I worked for was an Employment website which gives the Vacancies to Job Seekers started working fine when we tested with the structure as “/YYYY/MM/DD/Category/Postname-post-id”. (Post-id is a unique numeric id created by wordpress, which can be helpful for news sites to feature their posts in some News Aggregators) Prior to that we tested with “Category/PostName”, “YYYY/MM/DD/PostName” etc. And for a Student Information Site “Category/Post-Name” Worked great.

For another Sales Site it Could be “Category/Postname” suffice to feature in first page of a search. It is always better to test your site with different Permalink structures to milk the best results out of Search Engines. So Please share your experiences with Permalinks which would be a great help for me and other novice bloggers.

More Information to set your Permalinks can obtained from http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks