I changed my blog’s url structure from the wordpress default

http://iSimplyBlog.com/?p=193

to

http://isimplyblog.com/dont-lose-hope/193/

The new url makes more sense and also helps in gaining more search engine love, since search engines prefer your pages if they have the required keywords in the URL.

If you have a self hosted wordpress blog and would love to have a url (permalink) structure that is search engine friendly then follow the steps below:

1. Skip this step if you are planning to make the changes in a brand new blog. If you already have a few posts on your blog with the default url structure then read on.

When you change the permalink of your wordpress blog, all the links that have been pointing to your posts would be broken since your blog posts would have the new url structure. To prevent this from happening, install and activate the Permalink Redirect WordPress Plugin.

There are a few things you can do with this plugin like redirecting all your feeds to your feedburner account etc. You can explore these later. For now, you just need to install and ACTIVATE the plugin.

2. Go to your wordpress blogs dashboard and click on ‘Settings‘.

Under ‘Settings‘ click ‘Permalinks‘.

You can see a host of options. You can even have your own custom permalink structure which is what we are going to do here. It is said that a few search engines give preference even to the level at which the keywords are located in a url. So, a url like

http://www.iSimplyBlog.com/dont-lose-hope/193/

would have more preference compared to something like

http://www.iSimplyBlog.com/2008/10/dont-lose-hope/

So as a trade off, I recommend having a permalink structure wherein you have the name of your blog post followed by the post id.

Under the ‘Permalinks‘ option, select ‘Custom Structure‘ and type the following

/%postname%/%post_id%/

optimize blog url, search engine friendly url

(Click the image to enlarge)

3. I hope you have activated the Permalinks Redirect plugin. If you are sure about it then click the ‘Save Changes‘ button. Your new permalink structure is now active along with the 301 redirects(permanent redirects) for your old links.

Please Note: It’s always a better idea to try this out in a test blog before actually implementing it on your main blog.

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