Over the next couple of days I will be going through some easy quick fixes you can make to your blog in order to get a higher ranking in the major search engines and get more traffic overall!

Tip of the Day Number 1 : Using Custom Permalinks

What is a Permalink?

Each blog post is assigned their own permanent web site address (URL), this a called a permalink.  This link is automatically generated when you publish a new post.  The default permalink in Wordpress looks like the following:

http://yourdomainname.com/?p=100/

where the p stands for post, and the 100 is just the ID that is assigned to that particular post.

However, in Wordpress you can customize your permalink to be more search engine friendly!

Why Should I Customize?

If you want your site to be ranked higher in the search engines, customizing your permalinks is a must!  When you customize permalinks, you are automatically inserting keywords into the URL of your posts.  This will allow for search engines to reconize the keywords in your post and include your site in searches done on those search keywords.  One of the biggest things search engines look for when determining what sites to put in their results and their ranking, mainly depends on the keyword typed into the search and the keywords the search engine retrieves from different websites.

The default permalink in Wordpress is not keyword friendly what so ever!  It does not contain any keywords at all, its just a number of your post.  If you were to change the default to a custom permalink structure, you can automatically include the titles of your posts, which will then give you that keyword in your URL.  The custom format that I currenly use looks like this:

http://yourdomainname.com/2009/04/09/my-post-title

where when you break down the URL it is, year/month/day/your post title

How Do You Change Permalink to Make it More Search Engine Friendly?

The good news is that this pocess is fairly simple!!!

To choose the permalink settings you want to:

1.)  Go to settings menu (at the bottom of the left side bar in your Wordpress admin dashboard)

2.)  Click on Permalinks (the Permalink Settings page should open it looks like this:

Here you will see the different options you have to customize your permalinks.  You will notice that the default box is selected under the common settings section. This is what we want to change!

3.)  You want to Select the Custom Structure box.

4.)  You can then type in the permalink setting you want. So lets type in the new permalink!

To make the permalink look like this:

http://yourdomainname.com/2009/04/09/my-post-title

Type:   http://yourdomainname.com/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/

**Make sure that you put the slashes before/between/at the end of each tag

**Also by changing the permalink structure will affect the permalinks for previous posted material as well

5.) Click SAVE when you are finished

Below is a quick guide of what you can put in the customize permalink:

%postname%     =    The name of your post separated by hyphens (your-post-name)

%category%      =     The category name of your post

%post_id%          =    The ID of the post (ex. 123)

%author%          =     Post’s author

%year%              =     Year of post

%monthnum%  =    Month of post in numbers (April= 04)

%day%                =     Day of post in number

Hope this helps!

Till Next Post,

Krista

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