How to Optimize your Permalinks and set HTACCESS

In a previous post, I explained how to optimize your Wordpress for SEO. One of those changes includes optimizing the Permalink structure. I think that the best permalink structure is %year% , %monthnum% , %postname%. I recommend this optimization for new blogs only. Don’t change this setting if your blog has been online for long time. You can configure this on your Wordpress Dashboard. Just go to “Settings” and then “Permalinks”. There select ”Month and name” and save changes.

After changing your permalink structure, you will probably get this message: “If your .htaccess file were writable……”. If you don’t receive this message, then don’t continue. But if you do, you will need to create a .HTACCESS file. Otherwise, your permalinks will show as broken links. It is very simple to set the .HTACCESS, and believe me, it’s worth it, because you are optimizing your links for search engines like Google, and that means more traffic.

I will give you two options. You can either download the zipped .htaccess file OR you can write your own .htaccess file. If you download the zipped archive, just unzip it and upload the file to your htdocs directory or your Wordpress root directory. If you want to write your own .HTACCESS file, just open notepad, create a new archive and paste the following code:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

Then save it as .htaccess and upload it to your htdocs folder or wordpress root directory. Your optimized permalinks are all set! You can test this by clicking on the title of any post and check that the URL contains the title of your article. Good luck.

Tags: Blogs, Google, Optimization, Seo, Wordpress

Articles, Search Engines, Wordpress | admin June 1, 2009

11 Comments to “How to Optimize your Permalinks and set HTACCESS”

By Pseugsnem, June 5, 2009 @ 10:27 AM

Hi, Congratulations to the site owner for this marvelous work you’ve done. It has lots of useful and interesting data.

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- By admin, June 5, 2009 @ 2:24 PM
  
  Thanks for your feedback.
  
  Reply
By Irwan M Santika, June 21, 2009 @ 2:18 PM

Just makes some friendly, i hope can give you some contributions.
Thank you very much

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By alie, August 24, 2009 @ 1:20 AM

a lot of info and nice theme i found here, thanks for share about it, i’m using your theme too

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- By admin, August 24, 2009 @ 7:41 PM
  
  Thank you Alie!
  
  Don’t hesitate to contact me if you need help with something
  
  Greetings,
  Alex.
  
  Reply
By Bodyc, September 2, 2009 @ 8:00 PM

Hi there,
Interesting, I`ll quote it on my site later.

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By ariston, September 17, 2009 @ 7:02 AM

Hi there,
Thanks for the great info and tuts! Found your site while searching about permalinks and htaccess files (and maybe I can also use some of your awesome templates)

New subscriber,
Ariston

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By Ola Nordmann, January 2, 2010 @ 11:51 AM

“I think that the best permalink structure is %year% , %monthnum% , %postname%. ”
This is better, only: %postname%
This because folders SEO value will drop further out in the URL.

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By Yaira, February 5, 2010 @ 11:09 PM

OMG many thanks this save me, when I updated to a newer version of wordpress my old permalinks would not work but with this I was able to fix the .hcaccess and save it all! thanks a lot.

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