I’ve been blogging for a couple years now using WordPress software hosted on one of my linux servers.
I’ve done a little customization of the sidebar by editing PHP, upgraded a couple times finally getting to WordPress 2.2, and added a weather plug-in and the PHP APC op-code cache.
So I guess it’s finally time to really make WordPress behave the way I want.
Today I enabled descriptive permalinks. Instead of the “ugly” links like /blog/index.php?p=1, descriptive permalinks like /blog/category/my-latest-post.html are also available.
There’s 3 steps to enable descriptive permalinks:
- Allow Apache/WordPress to write to your .htaccess file while setting up permalinks
- Allow apache to use the .htaccess file with an AllowOverride directive in your httpd.conf file
- in WordPress go to Site Admin … Dashboard … Options … Permalinks … Custom and use a template like “/%category%/%postname%.html”
Then test it, and after it works you can make the .htaccess read-only to apache. If you encounter a problem, check your error_log to see exactly what problems are being logged.
The potential benefit is that in some cases SEO is improved with descriptive permalinks. More SEO is better I guess, although I’ve been doing fine in SERPs (free “organic” search engine results pages) with just writing detailed content and “ugly” links.
I also came across a link to WP-Cache 2.0.
I already use APC, but WP-Cache creates static pages and redirects to them. Very cool, I enabled that and it seems to be working. Some timing statistics are added in the HTML as a comment, and the cache directory is working as expected.
WordPress has fairly good performance with APC, but it’s worth improving in shared hosting environments, a busy database or in case of slashdotting.
There are options to not cache pages being crawled by search engines.
Tom Raftery: Boost Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) using Permalinks