SEO Tip #1 : Use “Pretty Permalinks” with Apache mod_rewrite

In this SEO series of articles I aim to provide a list of practical tips to optimisation your blog or website for the search engines.

Let’s start off with “Pretty Permalinks” using the Apache mod_rewrite.

Compare the following urls.

http://www.weeatbricks.com/?p=25

and

http://www.weeatbricks.com/2007/09/01/in_place_editor_field-method-in-ruby-on-rails/

The second is friendlier than the first. It gives an idea of the content of the article whereas the first is a mystery. Those all important search engine spiders can use those “pretty” urls to gain further data on the content of the article which in turn can increase the page rank of the article.

I use wordpress as my blogging platform. I created a .htaccess file in the root directory of the blog then turned Pretty Permalinks on in the Wordpress Admin.

That’s it and so ends the first SEO tip.

Stay tuned for more.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 10th, 2007 at 9:23 pm and is filed under SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.