Are you still not getting the search engine rank positions you want? Well, maybe I can help you with that. I want to take a quick minute to share with you a trick you can do to improve your search engine rankings. It’s extremely easy to do if you’re using WordPress. If you’re not, I’ll write another article later on showing you how to do this same thing without using WordPress.
So, what’s this super cool trick? “Permalinks”. Permalink is short for “permanent link” and it is basically a link that points back to a specific blog entry. Permalinks are what other sites use to link back to you. If done incorrectly, permalinks can actually hurt your search engine rankings. How many times have you been to a website (possibly your own) and noticed that the URL looked like some sort of cryptic message that doesn’t mean anything to you? For instance, by default, WordPress creates your permalinks by tacking on “?p=###” to the end of your addresses. The “#s” are numbers that indicate the post ID for that particular article. Well, if you can’t understand what that means by looking at it, neither can the search engines.
To make sure your permalinks are generated correctly, log into your WordPress admin console and go to “Settings > Permalinks”. This is where we’re gonna tell WordPress how to create our permalinks so that they are easier to understand and help us get high search engine rankings. After all, ranking high on search engine means that we have a better chance of getting more traffic and ultimately more money. So, once you’ve clicked on the permalinks settings page, you’ll notice that there are a few different permalink options for us to choose from. All of the options provided are pretty good, but we’re not looking for “pretty good”. We’re looking for the “best”!
Before making changes to your permalink settings, you’ll need to make sure you have write access to the “.htaccess” file located on your server, usually found in the root of your web folder. Some host providers do not allow you access to this file. If you do have access to the “.htaccess” file, go ahead and click the option for “Custom Structure”. Then, in the text box to the right of that, type in the following line:
/articles/%category%/%postname%/
After you’ve entered your custom structure code, go ahead and click the “Save Changes” button. Then, you’ll need to copy the contents of the “.htaccess” text box at the bottom of the page into your “.htaccess” file and save it. This is a must for getting your permalinks to work properly. The code we put in the custom structure field tells WordPress to structure our permalinks by adding “/articles/” to the end of your domain URL followed by the category the article is listed under and then followed by the title of the article. Since search engines like to see lots of keywords, including your article category & title in the URL is a HUGE way to get search engines to like your pages. This also makes it easier for normal people to get a quick idea of what they’re going to find when they click on that link.
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[...] Permalink Migration by LuCuS under WordPress Last month, I showed you how to optimize your WordPress blog for better search engine rankings. In that article, I taught you how to change the structure of your permalinks so that your URLs [...]