This is something that many wordpress users overlook and the sooner you get it right the better. Search engine results are influenced by the URL so make sure you have good ones!

Permalinks

I have seen so many wordpress accounts lately who are using the standard permalinks. Permalinks are the way your URL is set up when you publish a post. The standard permalink structure looks something like http://yourblog.com/?p=5. And I am sure you can understand that ?p=5 isn’t very search engine friendly (or people friendly for that matter).

To set up great permalinks go to Settings>Permalink in the wordpress admin panel. Then choose the “Custom Structure” then paste in the following text “/%category%/%postname%”. Now you will have a permalink structure that will look like this http://yourblog.com/category/postname.

More Tips

Because your categories are now in your URL you can use them to target keywords so keep that in mind when choosing them.

Category ID’s are assigned in the order you created them. If a post belongs to multiple categories it will be filed under the earliest category ID. This means you may have to choose fewer categories to make sure you get the right one in the URL.

If you blog isn’t new and you want to update your permalinks this can be a problem as all of your existing search enine traffic and backlinks go to the old URLs. Fortunately there is an easy solution. You can set up some 301 redirects for your site that will redirect traffic from search engines, bookmarks and other sites. The easiest way is to use the Permalinks Migration Plugin for WordPress which will set up your redirects automatically.

Once you have finished updating your permalinks I recommend you install the 404 notifier plugin to make sure all of your redirects are working properly.