In this video, we’re going take a look at how to edit your WordPress permalinks for SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

Now first of all, a permalink is nothing more than a URL.  In Wordpress you can define how your URLs will look in the address bar of a person’s browser. For SEO purposes, you want your URLs to contain keywords that are related to your blog/page topics and words that are related to the words that one would use to search for your blog in search engines.

To edit your permalinks, simply click on “Settings,” and you’ll see here a link that says “Permalinks” – click on that. And here, you would see that the default permalink for the WordPress blogs you’re using looks something like this: http://www.yourdomainname.com/?p=, and the number of the WordPress posts, or page.

Now there’s absolutely nothing wrong with leaving the permalink as it is by default, but if you want to optimize your blog for search engines and get more free traffic from such search engines, then you have to make your permalinks more search-engine friendly.  The other three options that are listed here that are actually more search-engine friendly permalink structures.

So let’s select the third one here that will display the month and the postname. So as you can see here, your post  would display the year, followed by the month, and  followed by the postname. But generally speaking, the year and the month numbers  are pretty much redundant and they really don’t help you a lot with  search engine optimization. So you may want to delete this entire section here and leave only the postname permalink quotes. And then I’m going to scroll to the bottom and click on “Save Changes.”

And after I did that, you can see I get a message from WordPress saying that “you should update your .htaccess now.” Htaccess is basically a file that controls access permissions to your WordPress blog. There are 2  ways you can edit your htaccess file: No. 1 is using an FTP application or your cPanel file manager. The other way is just contacting support and letting them do it for you. So I’m going show you the first one, which is using FTP. So I will just use my FTP program and connect to my web server, and then I will go  to the public_html folder.  And here, you can see your  .htaccess file. So what you should do is right-click on this, and select “File Permissions.”

And then you can either check all the boxes here to make it 777, or you could simply type in the number you want, and you’ll automatically update the access permissions. Then  to edit this file, you need to set this to 777, oo 755 or 766. But in most cases,  777 will do just fine  and click on “OK.”

Now, you go back to your WordPress permalink settings and your WordPress dashboard, and click on “Save Changes” again. And it says here that “Permalink structure updated.”

 And that’s how easy it is to optimize your permlinks for search engines.