If you have a blog, I’m sure that you would like to increase your search engine rankings by having better Search Engine Optimisation in your blog.

Now there are many things you can do, but I’m going to focus on one of the most efficient; Pretty Permalinks.

Permalinks (permanent link) is a term coined to say the URL or address of a page. For example the permalink for the last article was http://www.speekgeek.org/web-design/using-adsense-use-these-tips-tricks-and-tools/ if you clicked or entered that into the address bar, that URL will take you to that article.
Now that link isn’t the physical address of the page as you would find it on the server - it is created by using mod_rewrite, a feature in apache that lets you redirect your visitors (shown at the end of the article).

So you’ve set up Wordpress and you have a number of articles using the default permalink setting ‘http://www.yourwebsite.com/?p=123‘ which is basically saying to any search engine spiders ‘This is the x article of the website’ and nothing more, we can do better than that.

I’ve found that the best permalink structure to have is ‘http://www.yourwebsite.com/%category%/%postname%/‘
That way you are using two sections of your site to help with search engine optimisation, the category name and the name of the post. Using the previous example http://www.speekgeek.org/web-design/using-adsense-use-these-tips-tricks-and-tools/ allows the spiders to pick up important keywords such as ‘web’, ‘design’, ‘adsense’, ‘tips’, ‘tricks’ and ‘tools’ which is much more efficient than simply using the ID number of an article.

To change your permalink structure;

1. Log in to your admin panel.
2. Click the Options tab.
3. Click the Permalinks tab.
4. Click the Custom radio button and enter /%category%/%postname%/ into the box.

Either

5. Log into your FTP account using an FTP client and create a new file in the root directory of your website. Name this file .htaccess and CHMOD it to 777 and press ‘Update Permalink Structure’ on the page.
6. Press ‘Update Permalink Structure’ and copy the text it gives you. Paste this text into Notepad and save the file as .htaccess then upload the file to the root directory of your website.

If you have any other ideas for a better permalink structure, please let me know in the comments section.