Book Image

WordPress 2.7 Cookbook

Book Image

WordPress 2.7 Cookbook

Overview of this book

About 120,000 blogs are created every day. Most of them quickly die, but a few stay, grow up, and then become well known and respected places on the Web. If you are seriously interested in being in the top league, you will need to learn all the tricks of the trade. WordPress 2.7 Cookbook focuses on providing solutions to common WordPress problems, to make sure that your blog will be one of the ones that stay. The author's experience with WordPress enables him to share insights on using WordPress effectively, in a clear and friendly way, giving practical hands-on solutions to WordPress problems, questions, and common tasks ñ from themes to widgets and from SEO to security. Are you feeling limited with WordPress, or are you wondering how popular blogs do a certain kind of thing that you can't? With this cookbook, you will learn many WordPress secrets and techniques, with step-by-step, useful recipes dedicated to achieving a particular goal or solve a particular problem. You'll learn the secret of expensive premium themes, how to optimize your blog for SEO and online profits, and how to supercharge WordPress with killer functions used by the most popular blogs over the Internet.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
WordPress 2.7 Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface
2
Finding and Installing Themes
Index

Optimizing your permalinks for SEO


In my opinion, one of the most important things to ensure a good SEO is to use pretty URLs.

Pretty URLs use a technique called URL rewriting, which basically consists of transforming an URL with GET parameters to a human-readable URL.

Getting ready

For example, here's a dirty URL:

And now the same URL after some rewriting:

It's a sure thing that the second one is really a lot more pretty and readable. With this rewritten URL, a reader, as well as a search engine crawler, instantly knows that this page talks about WordPress. How can you guess the subject with the non-rewritten URL?

How to do it...

  1. By default, WordPress URLs aren't rewritten so as to avoid compatibility problems with non-Apache servers, and look like this:

    http://www.catswhocode.com/blog/?p=1526

  2. To modify your blog permalink structure, carry out the following steps:

    • Login to your WordPress dashboard...