WordPress SEO for Real Estate Websites-Permalinks

In WordPress, what some call a URL, we call Permalinks…

Permalinks are literally permanent links to your blog posts, yeah, the ones that live in your address bar because they contain the address to your blog post (or page).

WordPress sets them by default to look something like this…

http://virtualresults.net/?p=123

Now, having important keywords in your URL (permalinks) is pretty darn important to the major search engines, (arguably, one of the top 5 most important things in the Google algorithm) So, unless your post HAPPENS to be about the number 123, we should really change this.. In addition, it gives your readers a better idea what your post is about…

Change to what? and how? Well here again, there are two schools of thought…
1) www.yourdomain.com/the-title-of-your-post/
2) www.yourdomain.com/category/the-title-of-your-post/

Both make a ton of sense in the proper situation… I tend to favor number two when I can build keyword rich, important categories and write proper descriptions for those categories…

How to change to “pretty Permalinks”
In WP 2.7, simply locate the link that says “permalinks” near the bottom of your left hand tool bar, under “settings”…

next choose the radio button next to “custom settings” and finally enter the permalink structure youhave decided on…

For 1) www.yourdomain.com/the-title-of-your-post enter /%postname%/
For 2) www.yourdomain.com/category/the-title-of-your-post enter /%category%/%postname%/.

Thats it your done?

*Note that if your .htaccess file is not set to be writeable, WordPress will produce a set of codes which you’ll need to copy and paste to your .htaccess file!

Now, I know this is really simple stuff for a lot of you, but please hang with me and SUBCRIBE, because it is going to get a lot more interesting….

Next Post? When is the last time you invested some time in your robots.txt file?