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As most folks know, one of the things search engines examine is your Page Title, and also the filename of the page (like white-tennis-shoes.html for example), to help them figure out what your page is about, so that they can serve it up to somebody looking for just that thing.

Because of the convenience of working with blog software, these days lots of people use it to build their sites. Because of its popularity, I’ll use Wordpress blog software in this example.

When you’re creating a ‘page’ in Wordpress, you get to choose your title, and that’s swell. And on that page-editing panel, you can also tweak the name of the ‘page’. That is your title might be ‘How to get the Most Comfortable White Tennis Shoes’, and you might tweak the page name to be ‘white-tennis-shoes’ on that same panel.

But when you create a ‘post’ (or article), in a default Wordpress install, you have no option to tweak the ‘page name’. And in fact, the default page name will look something like this –

http://yourgreatdomain.com/?p=1234

However, it’s easy to fix, so that the url and page name becomes –

http://yourgreatdomain.com/white-tennis-shoes/

Here’s how –

(Step 1) THE HTACCESS FILE –

You’ll need shell access, and see if you have an .htaccess file in the html root (usually the ‘public_html’ folder).

If you don’t have one, type ‘touch .htaccess’ and it will create one.

Then type ‘chmod 777 .htaccess’. (Don’t copy my quote marks.) This makes the .htaccess file writeable. I’ve heard that on some systems you can type chmod 755 .htaccess, but that doesn’t work on my system.

Wordpress will need a writable .htaccess file to do some trickery in order to make the filenames as you are describing them.

(Step 2) PERMALINKS –

This is the word used by Wordpress to describe page titles in the format you want. The ‘permanent link’ at the end of your URL can be of the format ?p=255, or it could be of the format ‘2008/07/26/samplepost’, or several other formats.

To change Wordpress from the default format (?p=123), go to the Wordpress admin page, and on the right, click settings. Then on the resulting menu, click ‘Permalinks’.

You’ll see several choices. None *exactly* match what you want, but you can get it in two steps.

(a) Click on ‘Month and Name’. Notice that the last item ‘Custom Structure’ just suddenly changed and now it says /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%/.

(b) Now click on the last item ‘Custom Structure’, and erase the stuff at the beginning, leaving only /%postname%/

When you click the Update button, Wordpress will write some magical gobblygook into the .htaccess file, and what’s reallyl happening is that, internally, it’s still ?p=123, but now some translation is going on, and to the outside world (including you) it looks different.

AND NOW, LIFE IS WONDERFUL

Because now, the url and page name of your page will have become –

http://yourgreatdomain.com/white-tennis-shoes/

And that is a wonderful thing.