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.)

What is URL Rewriting?
Rewriting your URLs involves changing a dynamic URL to a static URL. This is typically done to fool search engines into thinking your dynamic pages are actually static pages.

Why is it Important to use URL Rewriting?
Simply put: static URLs perform much better than dynamic URLs in search results. So, if you have a dynamic, database-driven site you need to make the data in your URL appear as if it is calling a static page. URL rewriting helps your pages get better rakings in search results on all the major search engines. It is one of the most important SEO tricks you can know.

What is the Difference Between a Static URL and a Dynamic URL?
In a dynamic URL, the file name of a page on your website is followed by a “?” and other data. Here is an example from FatCatReport.com. When a user runs a search, this is the dynamic URL that is generated:

http://www.fatcatreport.com/index.php?s=apples

This “other data” determines what is displayed on the page. In the above example, a list of posts and pages with that contain the word ‘apples’ will be displayed.
A static URL contains only names of folders and files. If I was to rewrite the above URL, I would make it appear as if I have a folder on my site called “apples” that contains a file called ‘index.php.’ I might rewrite it to look something like the following:

http://www.fatcatreport.com/apples/index.php

How to Rewrite Your URLs
If, like the majority of websites, yours is hosted on a UNIX-based server running Apache Web Server, you’ll use an .htaccess file placed in your root directory to rewrite your URLs. Here’s how to recreate your own .htaccess file. However, creating an .htaccess is complex. So if you are not very technically savvy you might want to consider hiring someone on Elance.com or Get a Freelancer.com. I have hired freelancers using both these websites, and you can usually find someone for a very reasonable price.
If you your site is a blog and you use WordPress software, there is good news. URL rewriting is much easier with WordPress. To learn how to do this, visit my post on URL rewriting on a WordPress blog.

Here are a few visitor tracking software apps that are free or very affordable:

Google Analytics. Like all of Google’s other software apps, this one is top notch and free. A couple features worth mentioning are geo targeting and the Adwords integration. Geo targeting lets you see where in the world your traffic is coming from. Your hits are plotted on a map of the world and you can zoom in to view the number of hits in each city. Google Adwords integration is very useful if you advertise on Google. It lets you track user actions starting the moment someone clicks on your ads.

StatCounter. A good alternative to Google Analytics. One feature that I really like is its ability to track the actions and get IP addresses and location information for specific users. However, with their free version they offer unlimited summary data, but they only let you see expanded data from the last 500 page loads. To see more than that, you have to pay a monthly fee. Their paid plans range from $9 a month to see expanded data from the last 2,000 page loads to $49 a month to see expanded data for the last 100,000 page loads.

WordPress Analytics. A useful plugin for a WordPress blog. It provides the basics but its features are somewhat limited compared to other user tracking tools available (ex: you can’t filter out IP addresses you don’t want tracked, like your own). The upside is that your stats are displayed directly in your admin control panel so you can check your stats as you are managing your blog post. If you use WordPress Analytics, I recommend also using one of the other tools mentioned here.

FireStats. An open source tool that allows you to manage your user tracking tool on your own server without having to logon to someone else’s site. FireStats is not as feature-rich as Google Analytics or StatCounter but it has all the essentials and is easy to use. FireStats is free for non-commercial use and $25 per license for commercial use.