Affordable SEO Pt #2 – Let The SE Spiders Love Your URLs
When you create a page or post for your web site (or blog) it’s important to make sure the URL is also good spider bait for the search engine bots. Make sure you title your page around the main keywords you want the traffic on. This is also know as “Pretty Links” or “Pretty URLs”. For example:
(h)ttp://www.yoursite.com/your-great-article-title-with-your-desired-keywords-in-it.htm
For a static web site I would title the page with dashes, so that the URL ends up the URL example above. If you use a WordPress blog there is a way to make this happen automatically when you make a new post.
You may have noticed that all the pages of your default WordPress blog have URLs that look like something like this:
(h)ttp://www.yoursite.com/?p=15
The above URL is not ideal for search engine indexing, so there is an easy way to change all that. Follow the instructions below to change your URLs (permalink structure).
Download this file (1.htaccess.txt) right click the link and select “Save Target as…”. Download to your computer and then upload it into the root directory of your hosting server. Should be the same place your WordPress index.php file lives.
Once you have the 1.htaccess.txt file uploaded to your server, change the file permissions to 777 (see our video tutorial on how to change file permissions click here) After you’ve successfully change file permissions, change the file name from 1.htaccess.txt to .htaccess.
Once you have done the above, login to your WordPress blog and click options and then permalinks. Choose one of the permalink options. (I suggest using the Date and name based choice, or a custom choice of your choosing) Then click the Update Permalink Structure button at the bottom/right of the page. That’s it. Now your URLs will be search engine spider friendly, using the title and the main keywords of your post in the web page address. This automatically changes all the URL addresses of your blog, so you want to do this when your first start your blog.
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