SEO Friendly URLs for Wordpress (Permalinks)
As promised in my last post, I will now teach you guys how to actually rank for the long-tailed keywords using wordpress. As we all know that Google actually looks at the url for the keyword as well as the page-title. So it is very possible that the site with the url that has the keyword will rank higher.
To show you that google does count the url

Now having that said you definately need to get your blogs url to show keywords in it to rank high and pick up some good long-tail keywords.
By Default your wordpress blog comes with
< http://example.com/?p=N > This sort of structure where N is the number specified to the item in mysql. This is completely non-seo friendly because it is not static. Whatever you do you need to get rid of this one.
/%category%/%postname%/[/raw] Balkhis is running on the above permalink structure. What does that do? Well for instance when i posted about the Ultimate Promotion Technique the url was something like this www.balkhis.com/advertising/ultimate-promotion-technique/ It have the category name and the post title. Which resutled me to rank first for the keyword in google. Ultimate promotion technique Now this is just one way to get SEO Friendly Permanlink structure in wordpress and my favorite way by the way. There are multiple other ways you can do it. Another good technique I used was when i was making a more static content site with wordpress. My designing firm Uzzz Productions, Yes even though it doesn't look like it ... It is powered by Wordpress. I used the same structure as Balkhis, but just added .html in the end so it became something like this: [raw]/%category%/%postname%.html
Which makes my post pages seem like that they are static pages.
http://www.uzzz.net/wordpress-templates/lupon-adsense-ready-free-wordpress-theme.html
Now this is just a trick and you can play it many different ways showed on the official wordpress page
Here are some of the tags you can use in making your own permalink structure
%year% - The year of the post, four digits, for example 2004
%monthnum% - Month of the year, for example 05
%day% - Day of the month, for example 28
%hour% - Hour of the day, for example 15
%minute% - Minute of the hour, for example 43
%second% - Second of the minute, for example 33
%postname% - A sanitized version of the title of the post (post slug field on Edit Post/Page panel). So “This Is A Great Post!” becomes this-is-a-great-post in the URI (see note below)
%post_id% - The unique ID # of the post, for example 423
%category% - A sanitized version of the category name (category slug field on New/Edit Category panel). Nested sub-categories appear as nested directories in the URI.
%author% - A sanitized version of the author name.
Now once you have decided which permalink structure you are going to be using… All you have to do is login to your wordpress admin panel.
Go to the menu Options > Permalinks
Select the field Custom, Specify below
Paste your permalink structure there, and click the button on the bottom of the page called Update Permalink Structure.
It will give you a small .htaccess code in the text field at the bottom, copy that code and paste it in your .htaccess file for your blog, and you are good to go.
Good luck ranking for the long-tail keywords and get some good traffic.









Mar 19, 2008
















Recently I try to install one permalink plugin to put .htm in the end of the url, but it doesn’t work in my WP 2.33. then I google for an alternative, I came up with this artikel. This really help me, I don’t know if I don’t have to install any plugin for this.
:)
Big thanks for you Dude
This article is really helpful. Thanx!
this changes shud b made while we start fresh new blog … right ?
wat if we change this to an existing blog few months old ?
right now am using “%postname%” now if i include category too then the urls will b changed … that wud b a bad idea of change for now .. right ?
It is really upto you Puneet. Depends on how you are doing for rankings right now. I definately say for new blogs they should go for this type of structure. Although I don’t think there is anything wrong with your structure either.
As long as you r not using ?p= and stuff, its fine. I suggest you dont change the structure now
thanks balkhi, I being search for this
I setup the perma link as you mentioned but I get 404 error when I click on the post. Is there any other change in htaccess required?
Not that I know off…. Really I can’t tell without seeing what is going on in your blog.
Great example Syed. Nice observation
A really helpfull step by step article, will come in handy, thanks syed.
Thanks for articles, I have searched blog same this since long time