Creating pretty URLs in WordPress

WordPress | on Apr. 07, 2011 | by 0 Comments

That WordPress is a previously blogging specific script that has evolved over time, to support content management system is a fact almost all WordPress users know too well. In fact this is one of the reasons why many bloggers and website owners opt to use WordPress in addition to the myriad of features that it provides as well it simplicity and flexibility. These are all facts that are known only too well by the WordPress community at large. In addition, WordPress has an untarnished reputation of being the best SEO friendly blogging cum website building platform in the current market. Perhaps even more appealing features about his software are the ability to customize the URLs which play a very important role in search engine optimization.

WordPress in its basic forms comes with default URLs that appear in the form to index.php?p=123 which are far from being pretty and search engine as well as user friendly. However, all is not lost at this point as it is possible to transform these ugly URLs into pretty ones as stated above. The URLs can be customized to show the post and page titles inclusive of keywords instead of these numbers that add no value to your SEO campaign. This article gives you a brief rundown of how to go about this process.

The first thing you need to do as in every instance where you need to customize anything on your blog is log on to your WordPress blog dashboard using your unique username and password created at the time of WordPress installation. Once you are thee, access the right hand menu which has permalinks within the settings option. T is here that you will find the option of deciding on the basic structure of the pretty URLs that you want to create. If you have no idea how to do this, WordPress offers you some options in the form of possible tags that you can use. You can use the post name, post id or any other structure that appeals to you. The basic structure that you choose will be applied to your URLs after you are through with each post.

You have the option of customizing your pretty URL further within each post. This can be done when editing or updating a post by clicking on the edit button that appears next to the URL right below the post. Here, you make some minimal customizations in case you need the URL to be a bit different from the preset default mode for particular reasons such as keyword addition.

When creating pretty URLs, you need to keep in mind that your host should support URL rewriting in order for this process to e effective. Hosts such as Apache have the url_rewrite module already enabled. If your host does not support the rewriting process, you may need to get in touch with your ISP. Some hosts may require you to have additional software to be able to rewrite URLs. Changing URLs for already indexed pages may affect the rankings for a short while before the new URLs are found by the search engine spiders but it worth the while for SEO purposes.

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