SEO Permalinks for WordPress
WordPress permalinks are yet another opportunity to optimize your site for search engine results. Aside from writing good content, building searchable directory structures is an effective white hat SEO trick. WordPress and Dean Lee’s Permalinks Migration plugin make it very easier to implement a category - post structure that will strengthen your page rank case with Google. Special thanks to Allen of www.covertmetaphor.com who inspired this post.
For anyone who uses or knows someone who uses one of the built-in permalink structures (default, date and name based or numeric) it is not too late! You can and should consider changing your permalink structure right now. With the help of the Permalinks Migration plugin your old posts will automatically be redirected to the new permalink structure using a “301 Redirect.”
Step-by-Step Instructions
- Download the Permalinks Migration plugin, unzip/unpack and upload the files to your ~wordpress/plugins directory
- Activate the Permalinks Migration plugin in your Wordpress admin console
- In your Wordpress admin console go to Options -> PermalinksMigration
- Enter your old permalink structure (ex: mysite.com/?p=123) then click “Update options”
- Go to Options -> Permalinks, select “Custom” then enter your desired structure, recommended /%category%/%postname%/
Using the recommended custom structure /%category%/%postname%/ your post articles will appear in the following format mysite.com/category/postname. Properly named, your category and post titles are now more items for a search engine to crawl and better position your site on the web. SEO permalinks … what will they think of next?
I’m sure this is a stupid question, but anyhow: we’re on Wordpress, but there’s no plugins directory where we can upload this. Is there another Wordpress you are talking about? What’s the catch - I’m lost.
If you are running a self hosted WordPress site your plugin directory should be located at /yoursite/wp-content/plugins/