Tips to Install Wordpress and Make SEO Friendly
I looked at a lot of articles on SEO + Wordpress and I still had a hard time. Reason: I installed Wordpress in my subfolder (subdirectory). I already have a mod rewrite in my root that I don’t want to mess with. It links to my articles here that use a mod rewrite from mysql to make the URL SEO friendly: http://www.trentmueller.com/internet-marketing-articles.php
So, the way I got a subfolder install of Wordpress to work was, change the default htaccess to:
# BEGIN WordPress
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /blog/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /blog/index.php
RewriteCond %{http_host} ^trentmueller.com [nc]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.trentmueller.com/blog/$1 [r=301,nc]
# END WordPress
I uploaded this updated .htaccess file to the root of my subfolder /blog/. If you do this, just replace your domain and the /blog name to whatever your subfolder is.
This guy’s post helped a little bit for that: http://perishablepress.com/press/2006/06/14/the-htaccess-rules-for-all-wordpress-permalinks/
but aside from that, this posting seemed the most helpful for actually optimizing Wordpress for search engines:
http://www.mytypes.com/seoblogtemplates/wordpress-seo-guide/
In configuring the Wordpress Permalinks, was a little confused on whether I was supposed to put a slash before the URL or not, but here’s what I ended up with that worked:
Options > Permalinks > Custom:
/%postname%.html
And under Options > General:
Wordpress address (URL) and Blog Address (URL) were both set to the same thing, with no trailing slash:
http://www.trentmueller.com/blog