Here is a quick and easy way to make you Wordpress permalinks better. With this solution you will remove the date that is normally in between the site domain name and the posts. You should do this because frankly the date means nothing. It is put there so that if you have 2 posts with the same name, wordpress won’t get confused. Your website archive will still work and all posts will still be searchable by date.

Setting up the permalink is the first thing I do when setting up a website with a SILO structure. A SILO website is built around keyword themes. Your website will have different silo’s for each keyword and they do not cross reference each other. Silo really means isolation. I’ll talk more about silo wordpress themes soon.

After you do this, your permalinks will be category/post name which is much better then date/category/postname

For example: http://myseotutorials.com/seo-articles/how-to-improve-seo.html

you can see from the example, when the Google spider hits your website it’s sees a domain name about SEO, a category about SEO, and the post is about SEO… the Google spider knows exactly what to expect and with a proper post with good keyword density, your posts will have very strong SEO.

How To:

In wordpress admin, go to Settings > permalinks and make a custom permalink

You can see that you add /%category%/%postname%.html

For category base, just add a period. You don’t need to add anything to tag base.

I needed to add the html becuase sub categories will cause errors without it. You don’t have to use .html, you can use anything but .html is widely understood as a web file.

My next post about SEO will discuss the SILO strategy. How to isolate your categories by keywords for a powerful SEO blog

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