I’ll be getting stuck into the Beginners’ Guides to WordPress and SEO over the next few days, but I thought it would be a good idea to post this little anecdote while it’s still fresh in my mind.

One of the things that you learn very quickly about optimizing a website for search engine visibility is that it’s very important to have “friendly URLs.”  This means that rather than making do with the default strings of numbers, question marks and related post-ID paraphenalia that WordPress and most of the other CMS’s out there will generate, you want them to give you nice easy to remember addresses made up of real words.  There are a number of reasons for doing this, which I’ll go into more detail about in a dedicated post in the future, but suffice to say it makes it easier for search engines to figure out what your page/post is about, makes it easier for your readers to figure out what your page/post is about, which makes it easier for them to remember the URL (and with any luck put a link to it on their own site) and all in all just looks prettier up there in the address bar at the top of your browser.  Go on, have a look.  Isn’t that much nicer than if it was just some blahblahblah.com/?p=2348 gibberish?  I knew you’d agree.

Now, the beauty part of WordPress is that it makes it really easy for you to talk it into making your URLs nice and friendly.  You just log into your site admin, go to Options, then to Permalinks where you find a list of “Common Options” which allow you to choose between the default (/?p=123) nastiness, or a couple of standard formats which will include things like the date and title of a post, or the category it’s been tagged with.  Of course, if you want really friendly URLs, you’ll want to select the “Custom” option at the bottom of this list and then specify exactly what information you want to include in the URLs for your posts.  The most important part to include in here is /%postname%/ as this is the bit that tells WordPress that you want it to use the title of your blogpost in the address, rather than just the post’s ID number.  There’s a really useful article over at MetaToast.com called Structural SEO for WordPress blogs which goes into a lot more details about this and a number of other useful tips for setting up WordPress, so I won’t bore you by retreading everything that they’ve already written.  Instead, I’ll tell you about how I managed to mess up this seemingly simple alteration (and then fix it in about five seconds once I realized what I’d done).

While I was setting up this site I went into the permalink options and changed them to give me a friendlier URL structure.  In the “Custom Structure” input field I put:

http://www.seopscentre.com/%category&/%postname%/

Can you spot the two mistakes?
You get a point for noticing the “&” where there should be a “%” after “category” but what about the other one?
If you said, “You’ve put your domain name in at the start you stupid monkey!” give yourself two bonus points and go to the top of the class.  You see I didn’t realize that when I first put it in (silly me).  In fact I didn’t realize it until a couple of days later, when I was at work showing one of my colleagues the progress I’d made on getting it set up and she pointed out that if you clicked on the post’s title on the home page, to go to the post’s own page, it came up with a 404 Not Found error.  Looking closer, I noticed that the link was pointing at http://www.seopscentre.com/http:/seopscentre.com/beginners-guides/hello-good-evening-and-welcome.

D’oh!  It’s decided to put the domain name in twice.  That’s not right.

After a couple of minutes of scratching my head and wondering how’d I’d managed to mess that up, it occured to me to go and have another look at the permalink options.  A quick clear out of the domain gubbins at the start of the “Custom Structure” field (and a correction of the “&” that should’ve been a “%”) and everything’s working the way it’s supposed to.  That’s one of the brilliant things about WordPress; if you mess up by changing a setting the wrong way, you can usually change it back pretty easily and fix things.  Just remember to take backups from time to time just in case.  Especially if you’re planning to start digging around changing the code in things like your .htaccess file.  But I’ll go into more detail about that in another post.