It occurs to me that the timing is very apt. As we head towards the end of the first month of 2011, sales teams will be frantically ensuring they are hitting their targets. It is an unfortunate situation but in such times due-diligence can be easily sidelined in the frantic dash to secure revenue for those last closing days of the month. So, if you’re seeing any new accounts suddenly appearing trying to force their way past your normally thorough screening process… be careful.

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%