How To Supercharge Your Blog - Permalinks

By admin | May 14, 2008

Continuing in the series on How To Supercharge Your Blog, this post is on Permalinks. Of all the Blogging Tricks, this is probably the most important, because it will give you a Keyword Rich URL - Readable to the search engines.

The default URL for your blog post will look something like this:
=> www.your-domail.com/blog/p=104

By changing the Permlink Settings in the Wordpress Admin you can change this to a much more Usable - Search Engine Friendly URL that will include the Post Title.

There are a few options when doing this. For this blog I have elected to use the
=> Custom Structure: www.steverenner.com/Category/Post-Title

Here are the options:

* Default: http://www.steverenner.com/?p=123

* Day and name: http://www.steverenner.com/2008/05/14/sample-post/

* Month and name: http://www.steverenner.com/2008/05/sample-post/

* Numeric: http://www.steverenner.com/archives/123

* Custom Structure _______________________________

Some webmasters will use the Day/Name option - I recommend the Custom Structure option. This gives you precise control of the Blog Post URL.

There are basically 2 Options

/%category%/%postname%
/%postname%

If you want to include the Category Option use #1 if not use #2.

The trick to make this work it to update the .htaccess file

If your .htaccess file is writable, Wordpress will do this for you automatically, but it’s not it will give you the ”mod_rewrite” rules you need to include.

Example:

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

And that’s all there is to it. In the next update I will create a video that walks you through exactly how to do this!

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