Hi! Another quick video for Blog Tactics.
This one is to show you how to set up an SEO or search engine optimization, search engine-friendly permalink structure.
The permalink structure is the format in which your posts are recorded on your site. Let me show you what I mean by that.
Let us go to mattgarrett.com and click on one of the posts. This will actually have a search engine-friendly permalink structure when it comes up.
It will take a second or two, but if I pull this down, you will see what I mean.
Under mattgarrett.com, the file is called “do-you-get-twitter”, which is basically from the title here. Now that is search engine-friendly. It does not have any subdirectories, it does not have any question marks or other characters in there, and it contains the keywords.
So search engines like that sort of format for your permalink structure.
Now, let us have a look at where we changed the permalink structure.
If you log on to your blog, into the admin area and go to “options” “permalinks” you will have this page here. This is the default structure, which just gives a question mark and then the post number. Now obviously, that is not search engine-friendly, partly because of the question mark and partly because you have no keywords for the name for the post.
The second one is potentially better because it could have the keywords here, but you then got this long directory or folder structure. And then we have another one where it simply has archives and the number. None of these are search engine-friendly.
The best one I found is this here, post name with these tags at the front and end. So feel free to copy that and use it. You will then end up with search engine-friendly permalinks.
However, if you are going to do so, what you should also do is go to the Blog Tactics plug-ins page—you can see plug-ins at the top here—and if you scroll down, there is a plug-in called “Dean’s permalink migration plug-in”. What that will do is make sure that your old posts can still be found by simply setting up a redirect so that the search engines and your visitors can still find your old posts, even though you have changed the structure to this new post name permalink structure.
Now, there is another potential problem, which I am going to show you on Matt Garrett. I need to quickly make a change to show you what the potential problem is.
I have quickly updated my Matt Garrett site so I demonstrate what the potential problem is.
When you change that permalink structure, Word Press should automatically update a file on your site, on your domain called “HT access” but it does not always do it.
If it does not, what you will get is when someone clicks on the link for the post, instead of actually going through to the post, they will get this which is a “404 error”. It is basically saying the page cannot be found.
And the reason this is happening is because Word Press has not been able to update the ht access file with a bit of code that it needs for something called “mod-rewrite”.
Now, we have that bit of code here and I will show you how to make the change to make this fixed.
Now you can grab this code from mat7.com, blog tools, htaccess “mod-rewrite” code, click on that and there is a zip file, and it just has exactly what I have here, this code.
What you need to do is go to your site, log on with FTP software—I have done a previous video on mat4.com on how to use FTP software, and where you can get this particular one, FileAilla, because it is free.
What you need to do is go to the public html folder on your site, grab the htaccess file and download it to your local hard disc.
Then, we can edit that, and what we need to do—ignore this code here. That is for another video at another time—but all we need to do is copy this code here and paste it into this htaccess file, and then save that, and then upload that again to my public html directory.
It will ask me if I want to overwrite the existing file. We should, there we go.
Having done that, if I go back to mattgarrett.com and click on this icon again, this is linked again to the page. It should come up correctly because the mod-rewrite code has been added to the htaccess file.
If you get that error—this is really slow for some reason. I will just close some updates—the moment I hit pause, it came up.
So basically, if you changed your permalink structure so that it is SEO-friendly, you then have the problem that you click on the link for a post, and it is coming up with that “404 error”, you simply need to go to mat7.com, blog tools, grab that mod-rewrite code access, copy that code, paste it into your htaccess file, and then upload that FTP to your domain, and that will fix the problem.
This video is on Blog Tactics with the rest of my videos on how to make changes on your blogs. Thanks for watching.
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