TechCounter - TechNews, Money & SEO

Permalinks are permanent URLs to your posts, articles and other lists on your WordPress Blog. It is the URL used by your blog visitors as well as Search engines. Having an optimal Permalink Structure for your blog is very important for Search Engine Optimization.

An example of a poor URL structure could be

http://www.exampleblog.com/2007/05/18/archives/p=?421

Instead, a more efficient URL structure for a blog would be

http://www.exampleblog.com/category/post-title

If you are a new blogger and wish to optimize your blog, then use the helpful hints and the code required to optimize your blog with an optimal URL permalink structure 

However, for those people who have been blogging for a while, if you just change your permalink structure, you will end up with a lot of broken 404 links. So, how do we do a permalink migration for a wordpress blog and still keep search engines and more important visitors to your blog who might have bookmarked your old permalink structure happy. We use the Permalinks Migration Plugin and change the permalink structure of your blog without breaking the old links to your website

Plugin Name: Permalinks Mirgration Plugin

Plugin Author: Dean Lee

Plugin Page:

http://www.deanlee.cn/wordpress/permalinks-migration-plugin/

Download Permalinks Migration Plugin here

http://www.deanlee.cn/downloads/deans_permalinks_migration_v1.0.zip

How to set up my Blog for Permalink Migration

Step # 1: Download the Permalink Migration Plugin. Extract and upload the file to wp-content/plugins directory of your wordpress blog

Step # 2: Activate the Permalink Migration Plugin. In your WordPress Admin Dashboard, go to Plugins. Scroll down until you see Dean’s Permalink Migration and click Activate

Step # 3: Now, go to Options in your WordPress Admin Dashboard. Choose PermalinksMigration

Step # 4: Your current Permalink Options should have been filled out by default. If not fill out your permalink structure here and click Update Options

Step # 5: Now in Options, Click on Permalinks

Step # 6: Under Common Options, choose Custom Structure. In there paste the following

/%category%/%postname%/

Step # 7: Click Update Permalink Structure. That’s it.

To test it is working, go to Google and type in your blog name and try to locate a URL. When you click on it, you will automatically be redirected to the same post but with the new URL Structure

Benefit of using a 301 Permanent Redirect for a WordPress Blog

The most common permalink structure for WordPress blogs is the year/month/day/postname structure. However, this is not very good for search engine optimization. Say you have a good post but you wrote it last year. Someone using Google or other search engines would prefer a more recent post instead of yours, and reducing visitors. So the best URL permalink structure is the /category/postname.

Most SEO folks would suggest just having the postname. But we will use the category too in the URL since that is a valuable keyword driving up your article in search engine rankings. 

So, when we do this we need to tell the search engines that the article has moved to a new address. This is called a 301 Redirect also known as Permanent Redirect. Using this redirect allows the search engines to update their indexes quickly and you also retain your pagerank. Even people who were using the original URL would be redirected to the new URL as if nothing had happened.

Popularity: 41% [?]