On Monday I found myself running into an issue with my wordpress blog when I tried to change the permalink settings. I wrote an article about how to solve this problem. You can see the full article here. I'm sure it will help everyone with the same .htaccess problem! http://www.jvfconsulting.com/blog/60/Optimize_Wordpress_Permalinks_For_Better_Indexing.html So you have deployed and setup your new WordPress blog, but you want it to be indexed by Google and the other search engines as soon as possible. For spiders to easily find the content on your website it is best to use permalinks that contain the title of your post while not containing any characters such as: &, %, #, etc. Using the title of the blog post as the permalink is best because it contains keywords that are related to your article. If you are hosting your WordPress blog on an Apache server then you will also have to modify your .htaccess file. Just follow these instructions step by step and your blog will be indexed properly and fast! To access your permalink settings first log into your WordPress dashboard. Next click on "Settings", then click "Permalinks". There are four basic types of WordPress permalinks that can be found in the Permalink Settings located under the general settings tab. By default the "Ugly" way is selected, so urls will be displayed this way. “http://www.sistasizing.com/?p=123†To change the permalink structure to only include the title of the post first select Custom Structure. Next enter /%postname%/ into the blank box to the right. Now that you have made those changes your blog will correctly use the title in the url of your post. If you are hosting your WordPress blog on an Apache server running linux you will have to edit the .htaccess file. To get the permalinks to function properly I added the following code to the .htaccess file. Just copy and paste the following code into your .htaccess file to get it to work properly. Just be sure to change the url so it matches your blog url. The end result will make your URL look pretty like this... http://www.sistasizing.com/my-blues-emotional-eating/
Excellent information! Also, if your articles are news related, its good to have the year/month in there too...google likes this.
I commented your blog with something you may be overlooking or not and that is the trailing slash. And while it is technically correct to use a permalink structure like you show... with a trailing slash... how many people linking back to your pages will actually do that? This is why I choose to use an extension with the code... my preference being .html That way when people link to your article they choose the extension as part of the link and it gets around this issue.
JUST FYI: Google has already indexed this post! Wow! I found it while doing further research... not for WordPress, but for Joomla. Amazing! Seriously less than an hour and this post was in the top 10 results for the search phrase I was using. Just shows the power of an active authority site! This is a pretty good read on permalinks for Wordpress Users: "http://www.michaelbubbo.com/blog/2009/best-wordpress-permalink-structure"