The Most Important Change
to Make to Any New Wordpress Blog

and the change is called making a change to your ‘Permalinks structure’.

Simply put…  when you first set up your blog its like putting the framework of a high powered rocket ship under a very plain looking and basic functioning website.

Yes, you may want to add and play around with widgets, options and other so called plugins to make it attractive to the visitor’s eye and search engines too, but changing your ‘Permalinks structure’ is something you can do and should do right away.

Essentially your blog posts and pages will take on this look if you don’t change them…

http://yourblogwebsite.com/?p=123

and what you really want is something more along these lines… for several reasons

http://yourblogwebsite.com/%category%/%postname%

Note:  This may not be the structure you want forever… however many people use it…  And the good thing about Wordpress is that changing it back or to something entirely different can be done whenever you feel the need.

Here’s how to make this change I highly recommend…

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step #1 login to your blog at http://yourblogsite.com/wp-admin,
p.s. if you don’t know how to do this just call or email your web hosting service provider and they’ll show you what to do…

step #2 next, scan your eyes down the left side column to where you see the tab ‘Settings’ and click it,

step #3 below the ‘Settings’ tab you should see a tab called ”Permalinks’, now click on that tab too,

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Notice you now have 5 options under the heading ‘Common settings’…  You should notice that the circle to the left of  ‘Default’ has a blue dot in it which means that how your ‘Permalinks structure’ currently works.

Before you make any changes.  Let’s just go over why the other options are not so good…

First of all ‘Day and Name’ and ‘Month and Name’ are not the best because when people find links to these website pages of yours and see that the links are made up of older dates, they’ll be more inclined to ignore them because most people don’t want old news.

Also the option ‘Numeric’ is not a whole lot better than ‘Default’…  wouldn’t you agree.

So here’s what to do…

———-

step #4 highlight, copy and paste** this exact code –>  /%category%/%postname%  <– in the box to the right of ‘Custom Structure’ and then click the circle to the left of ‘Custom Structure’ until the blue dot is visible,

step #5 then click the blue ‘Save Changes’ button and you should be good to go.

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**  If you’ve never done a highlight, copy and paste before… this is what to do.

To ‘highlight’ hold your left click down as you drag your cursor over text you’d like to copy…  then ‘copy’ by pressing your ‘ctrl’ button and then the letter ‘c’ (holding them down at the same time)… finally place your cursor where you want the text to appear and press the ‘ctrl’ button once again and this time also press the letter ‘p’. (aka ‘paste’)

After following the above steps your posts and pages already created should have changed and more importantly as you create more new content, visitors and search engines will now have a much easier time getting to what you want others to see.

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If this information was helpful to you, a few kind words in a comment on this blog post would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers,

Rob

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http://www.twitter.com/robcanyon

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