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Search Engine Friendly Permalinks on WordpressA permalink is a URL that points to a specific blogging entry even after the entry has passed from the front page into the blog archives.-- Wikipedia Wordpress offers the ability to configure permalinks in a variety of ways. The default option uses date and post name, which although it is widely supported, it isn't search engine or user friendly. If you are creating web pages then it is normal, and from a search engine and user perspective beneficial, to include the keywords in the page name, Following the same logic, what is required in blog posts is that the blog page has the keywords in the post page name. To accomplish this you need to change the default permalink configuration. Old Posts and Permalink ChangesYou should note that although changing the permalink structure on WordPress is relatively easy it only changes the names internally. So what happens if someone has bookmarked on of your earlier posts? Simple if they try to access it they get a 404 error (page not found). In order to work around this you need to do a redirect from the old page to the new page using .htaccess file. Although this would work with a few old posts it isn't ideal if you have hundreds of them. Therefore if you have lots of old posts and those posts are ranked well in Google and have attracted inbound links you should thing twice about changing the permalink structure. Changing The Permalink StructureThis should ideally be done when setting up a new blog or for blogs that are relatively new and don't have many incoming links to old posts. ( see above) You need to choose Options>Permalinks from the admin control panel and you will see a list of options. The one I use results in post names like: http://blog.copeconsulting.co.uk/ppc/adwords-keyword-tool/ which as you can see includes the post keywords (higlighted). The name of the post includes the post category and the post name and is accomplished by setting the Custom option to: /%category%/%postname%/ as shown in the screenshot below:
Once set you need to click the Update Permalink structure for this to take effect. You should note that for the above to work Wordpress needs to be able to edit the .htaccess file. If you don't have access to this file on your server then the method above won't work for you. The Wordpress documentation states that if Wordpress can't access the .htaccess file it will display the changes on the screen so you can do it manually. When working on my Wordpress install it didn't do it for me. if you need to manually edit it this is what it should contain with an explanation.
If you don't have access to the .htaccess file then you can still use a similar format to the above but you will need to proceed your custom tags with index.php. So that the above would be index.php/%category%/%postname%/ http://blog.copeconsulting.co.uk/index.php/ppc/adwords-keyword-tool/ this is the so called pathinfo method. The structure seems strange and I find the links appear strange but it is search engine friendly. At this juncture it is probably best to explain a little about the WordPress index.php file
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