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Yes, I am new to WordPress, I’ve payed around with bits of it but like a petulant child have cast it aside when the next ‘new’ shiny thing comes along. WordPress by default creates links that are along the lines of http://myblog.somewhere.com/?p=NNN where NNN is the unique ID of the article.

This isn’t good for SEO as we all know you should try to reflect the title H1 tag in the url as well. Luckily WordPress does this seemlessly by using the mod_rewrite functionality of Apache.

1. Open up your WordPress Admin pabnel.
2. Goto Settings->Permalinks
3. Choose your desired url layout or make your own.

Here you can choose one of the already defined url layouts or create your own. I’ve opted to create my own
/%postname%/%post_id%/
which gives my urls a structure like
http://blog.adtools.co.uk/how-to-install-mencoder-mplayer-on-a-dreamhost-shared-host/183/
which is nice, not only is it SEO friebndly now but it also gives me the ID of the article at the end of the url which is handy for my own purposes.

Screengrab of the WordPress Admin Permalink Console:

Available variables to WordPress permalinks: A full description of available tags that can be incorporated in the url are here http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

%year%
%monthnum%
%day%
%hour%
%minute%
%second%
%postname%
%post_id%
%category%
%tag%
%author%