Tutorial: Wordpress SEO Step 1 - Permalink Structure

Posted by admin on August 27th, 2007

The first step in optimising your BLOG to be search engine friendly is to update your permalink structure(your BLOG URLs)

This tutorial will show you how to update your Permalink Structure

1. Check your current Permalink Structure

The first thing to do is click on a post and look at the page title in the address bar. Does is it resemble something like this http://**your blog address**/?p=121 if so then you are using the default permalink structure and the first thing we must do is change this.

2. Log in to Site Admin

Log-in into you BLOG back-end with your admin password

3. Go to Permalinks Tab

Go to Options then Permalinks

4. Change Permalink Structure

If you have not configured your Permalinks structure then will more than likely be sitting at the default setting which is: Default http://**your blog address**/?p=123 (Or something similar).

This setting allows Word-press to dictate what your page title will be and usually means your page title ends with a lot of numbers and characters at the end.

Whilst this works fine it doesn’t really make them very search engine friendly The first thing we are going to do is create a custom structure (click custom structure) to make our page titles more search engine friendly and easy to work with. I suggest using the following structure /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%/ as this will keep your page title fairly small and allow it to be found in search engines.

5. Update Permalink Structure

Click Update Permalink Structure to save these settings.

6. Confirm BlOG is using new Permalink Structure

Now view your blog and you should now find your page titles of your posts have changed and look something like this http://**your blog address**/2007/08/tutorial-windows-2003-cd-based-server-image/ notice it is now nice and easy to read without all the strange characters at the end.

Keep watching for step two in the Word-press SEO series.

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