As I mentioned in a recent post, URL Rewriting for SEO, static URLs perform far better in search results than dynamic URLs. Now, let’s look at URL rewriting for WordPress blogs. The good news? WordPress makes URL rewriting very easy.

How to enable URL Rewriting in WordPress 2.6.5
Log in to the admin control panel and do the following:

1. Click on ‘Settings’ in the top right corner.
2. Click on ‘Permalinks’
3. Select the one of the options under ‘Common Settings’ besides ‘Default’ (‘Default’ is the only option for static URLs.)
4. Copy the text in the form field at the bottom of the page.
5. Create a text file called htaccess.txt on your desktop (or anywhere you can get to it easily) and paste the text you just copied into it.
6. Log in to your hosting account using FTP software. Copy the htaccess.txt file to the root level of your hosting account.
7. Change the name of the htaccess.txt file to .htaccess. If a .htaccess file already exists in that location, delete it first before changing the name.

Including Keywords in Your URL
Like I’ve done here at FatCatReport.com, I recommend using keywords from the title of your post in the URL. Check out the URL of this page for an example. According to SearchEngineNews.com, including keywords in your URL can boost a page in the search results of major search engines.

To add keywords from your post title to the URL, select the ‘Custom Structure’ option under ‘Common Settings’ (step #3 above) and then enter %postname% in the input field next to it.

After you create a post, you can also manually modify a URL. To do this, go to the edit screen of the post. Near the top of the page, you will see the URL of the post with an ‘edit’ button next to it. I like to use this edit feature to shorten my URLs if my post titles are too long.

(Just a note: In my URLs, you may have noticed that I added the numerical values for the month and year before the post title keywords. This way, just by looking at the URL, I can tell the year and month the post was created. There is no SEO benefit to doing this. It’s simply a matter of personal preference.)