How do you make seo friendly links in Wordpress?

Example:

http://www.johnchow.com/website-traffic-post-titles-based-on-search-results/

See how john chow's blog titles become the link?

Thanks in advance, I'm about to start my blog so I want to do this from the get go.

 

Log into your wordpress site. And under Options - Permalinks check the custom option and change it to /%postname%/

I use /%category%/%postname%/%post_id%.html for all my sites.

Good luck

 

Why do you use post id if you already have it in a category and post name?

Also, what if you end up adding more categories later, will it get messed up if you move it do a different category?

 

I recommend to only use: /%postname%/
My article: http://www.jimwestergren.com/seo-for-wordpress-blogs/

 

Update:

I did this /%category%/%postname%/ and now I have a 500 internal server error... do I need to reinstall WP now?

Any help please.

 

I do it for the keywords,

keywords/more keywords/nail down the post for the serps/make it static

As Jim said /%postname%/ is also fine, i have just had better results since i changed my permalinks to that structure

Not sure, what is your url?

Good luck

 

I had to delete my .htaccess to make it work. But it's working now.

If I decided to go with just /%postname%/ can I always go back and change it later, or will that result in people not being able to get to my previous url's?

I guess I just want to make sure I set it up really well now for SEO so that I don't have to deal with it later... and I'm an SEO noob so that's why all the questions.

 

Never change it, never.

/%postname%/ will do fine.

 

Will I still be able to assign my posts to various categories though?

 

Of course. All just like normal.

 

Ok, well this will be my first WP blog, so that's why I was asking.

Thanks for all the help.

*rep*

 

Oh Jim,

I was looking through the rest of you stuff on that site. Do you recommend to do all of it?

Some of it seems like stuff I've never tried before... like messing around with the .htaccess file. The only thing I've ever done with the .htaccess file is set up a redirect to go from the non www to the www.

 

Yes, you should do all of it.

 

If you do change it, don't forget to 301 redirect the old links, otherwise Google won't like you.

 

i use /%post_id%/%postname%/

that way there is never going to be a problem with duplicate post names/urls

 

If you read my article you will see that there will anyway not be any problem even if you have 2 with the exact same as WordPress adds "-2" at the end of the second one. I did it myself and it was no problem. So just use /%postname%/

 

I use /%postname%.html

Jim, would /%postname%/ have any advantage over /%postname%.html from a SEO point of view?

 

Yes, I was wondering this is as well. What do you think Jim?

And isn't a 301 redirct this that you posted in your .htaccess file?

RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(.*)/$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.myblog.com/$1/ [L,R=301]

PHP:

Does it matter the order of the stuff on the .htaccess file as well? Because I see you mentioned adding the lines after the permalink lines... so I assume that by putting the /%post_id%/ it modifies the .htaccess file and then I need to add the other stuff after it?

 

No, but let me quote w3c in their section "What to leave out":

http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI

Yes.

Add my URL canonicalization handling before the permalinks.

 

Everyone might want to check out what wordpress says on correct permalink structure

Good luck