I shouldn’t be blogging about this really, It’s just that I visited a few Nigerian blogs, and I was amazed that most of them use wordpress just out of the box, no basic customization, nothing.Their permalinks still set to the default, which has no SEO benefits whatsoever. So my guess was either they don’t know the benefits or they just don’t know how to go about enabling it.
I know of a Nigerian marketer who happens to own a blog. He posts good contents and updates regularly, but none of his blog posts show up on Google search. Though there are so many factors that could be contributing to this, like duplicate content, on and off page optimization, not setting your robots.txt properly and off course the permalinks which he didn’t turn on. Turning that on could go a long way in helping his ranking on the search engines.
Like if he has a post about “How to Make Money Blogging”, this is what his url usually looks like: “http://his-domain-name.com/?p=282.
This is how the url will look like when the permalink is turned on: “http://his-domain-name.com/how-to-make-money-blogging.
You can see that besides helping search engines to figure out what your page is all about, it also helps your human visitors to know where they are clicking to. So in either case, you’re pleasing the search engines to get your page easily listed on the search results when somebody does a search, and also pleasing those who are searching. And of course I know search engines display your page title in their search result pages irrespective of whether you have pretty links or the ugly ones, but it still helps to turn that thing. I for one don’t like visiting pages with those kind of urls.
So if you blog with wordpress, and you still have those ugly urls, here’s how to configure your wordpress to display pretty ones, it’s pretty basic.
How To Turn on Pretty Links on WordPress
1. Log on to your wordpress admin panel.
2. Click on the “Settings” tab to expand it, if it’s not already expanded and opened.
3. Click on the “Permalinks” option.
4. Select the last option “Custome Structure”
5. Enter this value: /%postname%/
6. Save changes, and you’re done.
All of your previous posts and pages will automatically change from the previous urls.
However it’s advisable not to go back and forth with different url structures, as this could affect your SERP’s. Pick a url structure upfront and stick with it.
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Of course this post is loaded for people that are just starting with making use of wordpress, I hope that one day blogspot will start using category like wordpress and also allow permalink and one other thing is that if you use the default setting, your post topic will be far away from the url and it would be very difficult for the robot of the search engine to rank your post, using this type of setting also makes your SEO research become meaningful because topic will be relevant to your url, thank you for letting us know!