After seeing a most excellent post on a fellow freelancer’s blog, I noticed something wrong with the blog itself. Instead of the post’s URL (the actual web address of the blog post itself) reflecting the headline, it showed a number instead. The post URL read http://www.freelancewriterville.com/?p=2155. Instead, it should read http://www.freelancewriterville.com/the-difference-between-buyers-and-clients or some variation thereof.

Why? Because blogs with the “right” URLs are easier to Google–your latest blog post could be discovered on the strength of your headline and URL combination alone. But how do you get this URL format to work? Every blog platform is different, but for those of us using WordPress, it’s an easy fix:

1. Go to PERMALINKS in the SETTINGS section.

2. Choose DAY AND NAME under COMMON SETTINGS. It’s the one that looks like this:

3. You might have to make files writable in your WP-ADMIN folder to make this change work. If you change the settings and it still doesn’t work, you will have to go behind the scenes and do a bit of tweaking in your WP-ADMIN folders via FTP. You will see the following text towards the end of your COMMON SETTINGS section that reads:

“If your .htaccess file were writable, we could do this automatically, but it isn’t so these are the mod_rewrite rules you should have in your .htaccess CTRL + a to select all.”

If you see this text, there’s a workaround for that–insert the following code in the box into your .htaccess file if you know what you are doing:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /blog/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /blog/index.php [L]
</IfModule>

If you don’t know anything about modifying your .htaccess file go to WordPress.org and read this tutorial.