If you are new to using WordPress to rank in the search engines then you need to pay attention to what I about to tell you in this post. Don’t implement this small change and your SEO efforts will be less effective.
One of the biggest problems novice face when using WordPress, is starting off with the right WordPress settings for their blog.
If you make no other changes to your WordPress settings, you have got to make this one simple change as it will mean the difference between you getting found in the search engines for your target keyword or not.
Obviously there are other variables that contribute to you ranking in the search engines, that I’m not going to get into in this post, but this one change will just make ranking a whole lot easier.
What I am saying here is that you need to give yourself every chance of success. And look some of the changes may not take much time to implement, but the affect can pay big dividends.
This one setting on your WordPress blog is one of those changes that will pay big dividend, so hopefully I’ve got your full attention.
Change your Permalink Settings
As you can see the default url setting in WordPress is http://mydomainname.com/?p=123, which has no SEO value whatsoever.
As you might already know Google takes the url of a webpage into consideration when analyzing the value of a pages content, therefore if you are going to have any chance of ranking in the search engines for a keyword term then giving Google as many clues as to what your page is about can only be helpful to your rankings.
Okay, so here’s how you change it.
Go into Settings in WordPress, click on Permalinks, check the Custom Structure radio button as shown in the picture below and type in /%postname%/ and then click on the Save Changes button.
Once you have done this, depending on your server setup you will either have a .htaccess file or you will have to create one.
If you have to create one then log into cpanel where your blog is hosted and go to file manager and just create a file called .htaccess. Then copy and paste the mod_rewrite code as highlighted in the picture, save it and you’re done!
Once you have done that, test to make sure everything works. Any new post that you publish will have a portion of the title of your blog in the url instead of numbers.
And that’s all there is to it.