WordPress is one of the most popular blog platforms because it is free, open source, and great for SEO. That’s SEO - search engine optimization.
Webmasters and bloggers, those who are worth their salt, consider search engine optimization important because a healthy knowledge of it will practically ensure good rankings in the search engines. It involves studying search results and figuring out what best practices to use to help web pages rank well for their important key terms. One of the things that many webmasters and bloggers have found to help them rank better in the search engines is something called a permalink.
Why Permalinks Are Important - Even At GoDaddy
A permalink is simply the permanent URL address of a blog post. Whether you use WordPress or another blog software, your permalink is the URL that appears in a visitor’s web browser when they land on a specific post within your blog. WordPress has a default URL structure that looks like this:
http://newsandmediablog.com/?p=123
The special character “?” does not mean much to search engines. They will rank these pages, but some of your pages may not get crawled due to this permalink structure. That’s not good. So what you want to do is create a structure for your page URLs - your permalinks - that are more “search engine friendly.” That’s the part you need to know and which GoDaddy is not very good at recognizing.
There are any number of ways that you can structure your permalinks to benefit you. The bottom line is, you want to replace “?p=123″ with something that includes your keywords - the keywords that are important to your blog post, not necessarily your entire blog. For instance, this blog post that I’m writing now plays off of these keywords: “media”, “news”, “GoDaddy”. I have all three of those keywords in the title of this blog post and I want them all in my permalink as well.
If you set your WordPress permalink structure just right, your blog post title will become your permalink. Your URL for the blog post will then look like this:
http://newsandmediablog.com/online-media-news-is-godaddy-a-good-hosting-company
Of course, you can structure in a number of variations that include the date of the post, the title of the primary category you’ve placed the post in, or any other combination of important details. But you want to make sure that what follows the “/” after the domain name of your blog includes your primary keyword once. If you can do that then you’ll increase your chances of having that blog post rank well for your keyword in the search engines.
Sounds Simple, Now What, GoDaddy?
It does sound simple, but it is a little more complicated than that. To change your permalink structure, you have to find the htaccess file on your server and make some changes to it. In fact, you have to change your settings in WordPress for the structure that you want (WordPress gives you several options) then copy the code that WordPress generates for you and paste it into your htaccess file. If you do not have an htaccess file then you have to create one and past that code into your newly created htaccess file.
Creating an htaccess file is fairly simple. You can do it in Notepad. Then you FTP it onto your server in the root of your WordPress blog folder. If you do that with any host other than GoDaddy, it works like a charm. But you can’t do it with GoDaddy. They have a version of Apache that makes this an impossible task and causes bloggers using WordPress to be stuck with a less than adequate permalink structure. Chris McElroy explains it at Things That Just Piss Me Off.
GoDaddy is a popular web host because they are inexpensive and appeal to new webmasters who won’t ask a lot of questions. But if you want to run a WordPress blog through GoDaddy, you will have a tough time making SEO work in your favor and your competition will have the upper hand. That’s not good.
