Web Design Discussion

After you’ver installed your WordPress Blog you will notice all URLS contain “id” in them. This means they are not search engine friendly…search engines have a difficult time spidering this type of URL therefore you will lose traffic.

You need to optimize your blog by converting your long URLS to ones that include the title of your post.

Permalinks are permanent URLs to your individual weblog posts, categories and other lists of weblog postings. A permalink should be a link that does not change in its appearance because other bloggers may link to your post or your article.

Here’s a how to customize your permalinks

An alternative method is to use the Permalinks Migration Plugin for WordPress

This plug-in allows you to change your permalink structure,for example, from /%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/ to /%category%/%postname%/

Permalinks Migration Plugin Features:

1. Enables all your blog pages to be indexed by the search engines.

2. Makes it easy for others to link to you or bookmark your blog.

3. Allows you to include targeted keywords in your links (title post).

4. Won’t lose pagerank. The plug-in redirects traffic from your old URLs to the new URLs so you don’t lose any traffic during the migration.

How does the Permalinks Migration Plugin work?

It creates a “301 Redirect”, also known as a Permanent Redirect. This tells the search engines that the old page has permanently moved to another address. The old URL is replaced by the new URL. When the search engines spider your blog pages again they will update their indexes.

You will continue to receive the same amount of traffic as if no changes had been made to your blog.
Visitors will only see your new URL containing the title you used in your post.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 27th, 2007 at 10:15 am and is filed under Blogging . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.