Creating a WordPress blog is extremely simple, upload it and follow the directions.
But making sure people are reading what you write is a lot harder.
One of the biggest obstacles most WordPress users have is creating a search engine friendly site.
For most blog owners the majority of their visitors find their blog through a search engine and come across one of their many posts.
If "content is king", then Search Engine Optimization is the queen.
The easiest and one of the best thing you can do to optimize your site is make sure you have 'clean' urls.
In other words, you want your urls and permalinks to include keywords, and be easy to remember.
On a WordPress blog you can change your permalinks by signing into your admin panel.
Then click the settings tab and the permalinks subcategory.
From here, you can choose how to setup your permalinks.
My suggestion is to use the "custom structure" field and fill in "/%category%/%postname%/".
You can also use one of the ready made structures that WordPress has created there.
If you're using WordPress 2.
5 you can easily change the permalink to test out different structures, since it automatically adds .
htaccess redirection.
None the less if you're having issues with 404 errors, I highly suggest, downloading the 'redirection' plugin that can be found on the WordPress site.
It allows you to create custom redirects and logs all 404 errors.
Remember, a clean permalink structure not only makes your urls easy to read, but also make your pages rank higher in search engines.
But making sure people are reading what you write is a lot harder.
One of the biggest obstacles most WordPress users have is creating a search engine friendly site.
For most blog owners the majority of their visitors find their blog through a search engine and come across one of their many posts.
If "content is king", then Search Engine Optimization is the queen.
The easiest and one of the best thing you can do to optimize your site is make sure you have 'clean' urls.
In other words, you want your urls and permalinks to include keywords, and be easy to remember.
On a WordPress blog you can change your permalinks by signing into your admin panel.
Then click the settings tab and the permalinks subcategory.
From here, you can choose how to setup your permalinks.
My suggestion is to use the "custom structure" field and fill in "/%category%/%postname%/".
You can also use one of the ready made structures that WordPress has created there.
If you're using WordPress 2.
5 you can easily change the permalink to test out different structures, since it automatically adds .
htaccess redirection.
None the less if you're having issues with 404 errors, I highly suggest, downloading the 'redirection' plugin that can be found on the WordPress site.
It allows you to create custom redirects and logs all 404 errors.
Remember, a clean permalink structure not only makes your urls easy to read, but also make your pages rank higher in search engines.
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