I’ll admit it. I’m a bit of a hypocrite. In one of my posts named 10 Easy Free Way to Promote & Optimize Your Site, one of my tips was going to be the following:

Make sure to name your URLs appropriately. If you have a page about kittens, don’t name the page /topic1. This means nothing to the search engines and more importantly it means nothing to your readers. Instead name the page /kittens so that the URL will appear something like www.Awesomesite.com/kittens as opposed to this www.Awesomesite.com/topic1. Not only does this help you with your search ranking, but it also adds to the usability of your website.

The reason that I didn’t include this in my Top 10 list was because I honestly couldn’t figure out how to change the URLs for each individual post. Instead of my “About
Adventures In Hosting” URL looking the way it does now as http://adventuresinhosting.com/about_adventures_in_hosting/ (cool) it looked like this adventuresinhosting.com/?page_id=2. (not cool). That’s how all of my links used to look. This is a problem because such a link means nothing to you or the search engines. I was fairly ashamed by this actually because that’s how all the links on this blog were formatted as.

Each time I tried to change the permalinks or add a plugin to change the appearance, the blog would get broken. Finally, I asked one of my fellow A2 Hosting employees for help. I know that this isn’t fair since I’m supposed to be just like you and not know how to create a blog, but you have me to help you so let’s call it even. Follow the instructions below and you too will be able to create search engine savvy permalinks for your Wordpress blog.

1.) Download this plugin and install it in the wp-content/plugins directory for your blog.

2.) Log into your Wordpress admin area and activate this plugin by selecting Plugin in the top menu and pressing Activate next to the plugin named “Permalink Redirect” under Action.

3.) Select Options and then Permalinks in the menu. Select the Custom option and paste in /%postname%/ into the text box. Click Update Permalink Structure.

All of the URLs on your page will now be named after the title of the post or the page.