Wordpress Optimizing Permalinks (1)

In my opinion optimizing permalinks is the first step after finishing installing WordPress. By default, and many bloggers are not aware of the problem, this is how WordPress defines your URLs

» http://www.yourblog.com/?p=123

The search engines are able to index such URLs. However, from an SEO point of view, this URL is meaningless. Not having relevant keywords in the URL lowers your chances of ranking well in the SERPs (search engine positioning results) for a specific search query. To customize the Permalinks with keywords, you go to your Dashboard > Settings > Permalinks and select Date and name based or type into the custom box the following code (to take out the date from the URL): /%postname%/ or /%category%/%postname%/

This is the most SEO friendly structure for the Permalinks. I keep the year/month/day structure just to remember when I wrote a specific entry. On some WordPress themes using just /%postname%/ to define a permalink might cause some problems. Sometimes this command makes it impossible for the blogger to access the wp-admin folder or the stylesheets.

Avoid numeric URLs like

» http://hpapplication.com/?p=123

and

» http://hpapplication.com/archives/123

at all costs. If the title of your post (blog entry) is too long, you might have a problem. There are special situations when the search engines will penalize a blog entry for such a practice and send it to the supplemental results. To avoid this situation you could write a different post slug when you write your entry. Just go to Dashboard > Write > Post and write your post’s title as you usually do. The permalink will appear automatically under your title. Click Edit to shorten the URL: