SEO for WordPress

If you run your own website with WordPress as the choice of your CMS or Blog you want it to rank well don't you?

Well, the first thing you need to do is to change your "permalink" setting.
If you are on a normla shared hosting provider, you should be able to work with your own .htaccess file.

Oke, not everybody has heard about .htaccess and if you have herad form it, you think its is really difficult and technical stuff way beyond your reach.
Well, I can tell you its not!

Here is the most easy way to change your permalink to a much better option.
First create an empty file with Notepad or any Non-Wysiswig editor (So don't use Microsoft Word) and save it as htaccess.txt.
Upload that file via FTP to your WordPress installation directory.
Once uploaded change the permissions to 7o7 or Read Wrtie by the System and Public.

Now just change the name of the file to .htaccess insted of htaccess.txt.
On must FTP programs the file will disappear.... unless you have the view set to display "hidden files".
Don't worry about it, its still there!

No login to your WordPress administrator panel and go to the Permalinks option.
Choose "Custom Structure" and write down it that field /%postname%/

If you are on a windows hosting service (or testing it on your WAMMP based Windows PC) you need to include index.php, so that would be /index.php/%postname%/
The index.php will stay in your URL between the sitename and the posttitle.


Hit Save and your are done!
WordPress will fill the .htaccess file for you and in about 98% of all cases it will work right away.

If your now look at the posts in your site they will have trasformed from ?p=1 to /hello-world/ which is a lot better for both your visitors and search engine robots.

Want to use /%category%/%postname%/? You can, but I advice you not to, keep the URLs short and simple for the best results.

If you want to take the extra mile, install a plugin called SEO Slugs that will take out short stopwords out of the URL.
So the URL from "easy-how-to-do-wordpress-seo" will become "easy-wordpress-seo" which is even beter and done automaticly.

There is more to WordPress then this, so read more on this blog on how to get more advice on how to improve your Blog for search engines.