I am continually finding things I can do in Wordpress that simply were not possible in my old Blogger blogs. Moving my sites to Wordpress was one of the best things I did this year. I knew that post permalinks show by default in the browser title bar starting with the name of the blog. So every post on your blog will start with the same phrase, which is not what you want. It is much better to start with the titles of the individual post: after all that is what your visitor is searching for.

Just to clarify: the permalink is the URL of your blog post. The default Wordpress Permalink will therefore look something like: http://brilliant4.com/?p=24 the figure is your page number.

Custom permalinks can be formed in the ‘Options’ section of your Wordpress dashboard. For example -
http://brilliant4.com/2007/06/19/page-ranking-mistakes-to-avoid/

I wanted to change my URLs to emphasise the subject of each post rather than dates, like this:
http://brilliant4.com/page-ranking-mistakes-to-avoid/

So how is this done?
1. On your Wordpress admin panel go to Options > Permalinks.
2. To customize your permalinks select the right hand button labeled ‘Custom’, specify below and then enter /%postname%/ into the input field labeled Custom Structure
3. Click on ‘Update Options’ and off you go.

Just one warning from my experience: if you make sponsored posts on your blog this change can mean that the previous URLs result in a ‘404 not found’ if anyone tries to follow them. This happened to me and I had to explain to the Admin of various sites what had happened.

There are other ways of customising your permalink but this is the one that worked for me.

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