This tip is aimed at those of you using the WordPress blogging platform, or planning to. WordPress is relatively easy to set up. Many web hosting companies offer it as something you can set up with just a few clicks and some configuration information. Even if you don’t have that luxury, it’s still relatively easy to set up.

The problem is that, out of the box, WP (WordPress) has a lot of default options that don’t serve you well. For example, “permalinks”. Permalinks are the permanent URLs for each post that appears initially your blog’s home page, then eventually disappears as more posts are added. The permalink helps you find them. And if your blog is getting its posts indexed, that’s how most visitors will find you from a search engine.

Without getting into a detailed discussion of SEO (Search Engine Optimization), let’s just say that the default permalinks format isn’t exactly friendly. It consists of http://www.example.com followed by something like “/?p=123″. If I told you that this means postid, that may make sense, but it’s still not friendly. And when a search engine indexes the post, you score no extra relevance points for the URL.

On the other hand, if you were to replace that cryptic fragment with something like “/wordpress-choosing-permalinks”, that’s much better for both search engines and humans. That would resemble the title of your post fairly closely, minus punctuation, plus the hyphens. Or you could use /year/month/day/postname, /year/postname, just postname, /category/postname, etc.

Fortunately, that’s very easy to do, as you’ll see in this Tubetorial Quick Tips video in the SplashCast player below.