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How to Use Permalinks to Enhance Your WordPress SEO Blog

This is the first of the WordPress SEO Tutorials series.

By default, WordPress gives you this dynamic URL for your post: “http://yourdomain.com/?p=SOME-ID-NUMBER”. The best SEO permalink structure is to have your post appears with ‘category’ and the ‘post title’ in the URL.

This looks something like this: “http://yourdomain.com/category/post-title”

Why is this the best SEO permalink structure compares to the other structures?

To simply put, this permalink structure allows you to have ‘more’ keyword loaded into the URL of your post. Since the category that you’ve placed your post under usually related to the post title (which hopefully is keyword-loaded itself), you will have the extra SEO benefit if other people use that permalink structure to link your post.

How to Change the Default Permalinks to ‘Category/Post-Title’ Permalinks

In order to change the default permalink structure, you need to go to “OPTIONS -> Permalinks” in your admin panel and paste this code into the BOX after “Custom Structure:”

/%category%/%postname%/

Next, click the “Update Permalink Structure >>” button; if WordPress does NOT automatically update the permalink structure to for you–don’t worry–just do the following:

-If you don’t have a .htaccess file in your root directory (public_html/.htaccess) already, just ‘create a new file’ and name it .htaccess and place it in “public_html” directory or whatever directory you have your WordPress blog installed (e.g. public_html/blog/.htaccess, which is equivalent to http://yourdomain.com/blog/.htaccess).

-Then, copy and paste the code WordPress gives you after clicking on the “Update Permalink Structure >>” button into your .htaccess file. *Note: You need to click on the some option (e.g. ‘Edit’) of your .htaccess file to open up a window to paste your permalink code in the file.

The code is same as following if you are using WordPress 2.0 or higher:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

Just copy and paste that ‘mod-rewrite’ code into your .htaccess file, save it, and you are DONE!

Now, your old AND new post will automatically carry the category the post is assigned to, plus the title name of that post:

http://yourdomain.com/blog/category/post-title

*Note: That’s the default ‘Post-Slug’ structure after the updated permalink, but if you want to change the name of the ‘post-title’ in the post’s URL, just go to ‘Post-Slug’ (located on the right-hand side of the “Write” page) and input/change to what name you want.

Also, be sure to check out my post on “3 WordPress Plugins to Safely Change Your Permalink Structure” if you’re going to change to your blog’s old permalinks to a new permalink structure.

O.K. Now, that concludes my first WordPress SEO tutorial on permalink structure. If you have any question, just post a comment below…

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