Archive for February 20th, 2008

Configuring search friendly URL’s in WordPress

Wednesday, February 20th, 2008

Picture of the parmalinks page

WordPress dynamically creates all of your page names and they typically look like this. http://www.joebailey.org/?p123. The problem with this is that it’s not the best for search engines. Of course, search engines may still find your site, but if you made a couple of small changes to WordPress, it will help people find you better in search engines.

The answer is Permalinks - Permalinks allow you to create a custom url based on your preferences. so, instead of http://www.joebailey.org/?p123 you could have http://www.joebailey.org/building-a-blog/configuring-search-friendly-urls-in-wordpress/

Here are the steps to do it.
1. Login to the administrator in WordPress
2. In the top navigation, click on “Options”
3. In the sub navigation, click on “Permalinks”
4. Select the radio button titled “Custom, specify below”
5. In the custom structure box, type in /%category%/%postname%/
6. At the bottom of the page, click on the button titled “Update Permalink Structure” and that’s it.
7. As a precaution, test it out, by writing a new post.