A peek at Wordpress - permalinks and SEO sitemap

When it comes to free CMS, people usually think of Joomla, Drupal, openSourceCMS, etc. Yes, those are good CMS, and we have made a few websites by using those systems and they all turned out to be great in terms of usability. However, what impressed me the most is the open source PHP/MySQL based Wordpress. With a false impression of a blog CMS, it won’t come up to many un-geeky people’s mind when they want to have a CMS for their regular static page based website. However, as a web professional, I would strongly recommend wordpress as the first CMS choice for most of my clients, because it’s simply great and powerful to develop and use, not just as a blog CMS, but also in all. You can certainly use it for a regular blog free website.

In general, we should think of a blog as a regular website, take its categories the same as navigation menus. The only difference is blog category usually has the URL as www.yoursite.com/category/categoryname1. It’s very easy to turn this URL to www.yoursite.com/categoryname1 which looks just like a regular website subpage. And of course it’s good for the search engine to find your page with less sub-directory as we all know. So how to do that? All you need to do is just go to your wordpress admin page, settings -> Permalinks ->Optional, in the field of category base, simply enter “.” (without quotes of course).

Alright, this is just one little trick of wordpress. It’s just so powerful that it does many things for you already and all you need to do is just a few clicks. One more example. For the google SEO sitemap, when you have wordpress installed, you will never need to manually write up or update this tedious XML file. Go install this google XML sitemap plugin, it takes all your dynamic blog posts as well as static pages to the sitemap file and update it whenever you change something on your site.

One more little trick about this sitemap plugin, if you install your wordpress for only the blog session on your server, and all other pages are located one directory above the wordpress blog session, to include all other pages as well as the blog pages in the sitemap, you will need to upload the sitemap.xml file to the root directly of your site, but not wordpress directory. On the sitemap configuration page, in the “additional pages” section, add the URL of the pages that are located above the blog directory, in “Location of your sitemap file” session, choose “custom location” radio button, fill in the sitemap location manually (should be under root directory). In the sitemap content session, make sure to choose “include homepage”, “include static pages”. Last, click on the link of “build the sitemap for the first time”. Then you are done! No need more work when you add more post or do any updates on the site. Isn’t this cool?

BTW, there are many free and beautiful themes on wordpress.org, and also many interesting blog sites on wordpress.com. You can go get your free blog sites by signing up there.

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