I have seen this on a lot of blogs recently, so I think this tip is worth sharing: In WordPress, each post actually exists for Search Engine purposes as a single page. This page has it’s own name which is indexed by Google and the others.
Now you would think this page name would be set to something sensible like the name of the post? No, actually the default is something like:
‘www.YOURBLOG.com/p=4′
Very snappy, but useless for search engines. But very easily fixed.
In your WP admin, go to ‘Options’ then ‘Permalinks’. Select ‘Custom’ and then copy and paste this into the box:
/%postname%/
Then click ‘Update Permalink Structure’. Now your post will be indexed according to the post name, so if you like Google traffic, make it something good! 
NB: If you get the message about your .htaccess file not being writeable, don’t panic. Fire up your FTP program, and find the .htaccess file in your root blog directory. Right click on it and set it’s permissions to 777. Go back to WP admin, update the permalinks as above, then return to your FTP, and re-set the permissions to 644 or whatever it was before.
NB2: The above is intended for very new WordPress users who have little or no posts, and aren’t worried about losing links. If you have an established blog, you risk losing a lot of Google ‘juice’ as many internal and external links will be broken. Fortunately the solution appears to be quite straightforward: Use the Permalinks Migration Plugin. Please note I haven’t tried this, as I changed my permalinks very early on, but it should do the trick.
Thanks to Vinod for raising this issue.
10 users commented in " WordPress Permalinks – A Quick Tip "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackI have it currently as date+posttitle. I was thinking about changing it to just ‘title’. If I do that now, will my existing links get disturbed?. Will it affect the Google indexing?.
Excellent point Vinod, and one to treat with caution.
I wrote this thinking in terms of very new bloggers, and you’re right it could disturb existing links – although with a sitemap the new links would get indexed very quickly, existing deep-links from other sites may get disturbed.
I shall attempt to find out.
Thats a good tip…but it is even better if you put this:
/%category%/%postname%/
That way you get your category too (which is hopefully relevant and will help SEO even more)
So many good tips. I will really have to change from the free wordpress to a hosted one soon.
good tip from Matt too.
http://goldcoaster.wordpress.com
Good point Matt, and one I should probably have done for Blog-Op – perhaps I’ll have to test that plugin…
Come join us Goldcoaster, don’t be afraid….
good tips I think that would make more sense of an SEO stand point. better to do it in the beginning than latter.
Absolutely correct James!
Thanks for the tip. I have added the Permalinks Migration Plugin to my site
Thanks Tara, hope it does the trick.
I agree, changing your permalink structure should be one of the first things you do.
However, if you’re just starting, be careful about using /%category%/%postname%/. Using %category% isn’t sensible, unless you are very sure that your categories won’t change.
I fell into this trap – as my blog matures, I need to tweak the categories, which would break my permalinks.
Also, apparantly there is some bug with using just %postname%, but I don’t use it so I haven’t come across it. Pity, as I wanted to use it! Have you had any problems? Would be very interested to know.
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