I love WordPress, I really do, but i just screwed up a site by changing a bunch of permalinks to 302’s.

Worse, WP won’t allow me to change it back without digging into the database, so I effectively rendered my child page permalinks (URLs) useless.

In this short video I’ll show you exactly what not to do -( besides assume that WordPress will work the way it’s supposed to).

I’ll bet you $1000 that if we took an existing and well established default site installation today, and first upgraded it to WP 2.82, then we set WP up correctly with our chosen SEO plug-ins, correct permalinks, etc. that we would LOSE rankings in the search engines within 90 days.

In WordPress, the traditional behavior of the past few months has been that if you edit the Permalink of a page or post, the old URL will generate a 301 (permanent) redirect to the new URL.

This action follows SEO best practices, and in general it follows anyone’s common sense. It tells search engines that the page has been permanently moved, and it also retains the value of any incoming links that may have accumulated for that URL

I can’t even begin to count the number of WordPress blogs that I’ve set up personally, much less count how many have been done by various members of our team.

Literally dozens of hours have been spent doing the same repetitive and mundane tasks, ranging from changing default permalink structure to renaming the default category from “Uncategorized”.

We use WordPress to build a lot of websites, not only because it’s so easy, but because it’s great for search engine optimization.

However, when I began using it to build full sites as opposed to just supplementing existing sites with blogs, I noticed a big shortcoming.

Over the past couple of years, we’ve become quite dependent upon WordPress because of the versatility of this open source management system, allowing us to do nearly anything we can imagine.

In many cases WordPress can be a good supplement to existing website, allowing users to easily add and manage search engine friendly content without the need of the Web designer.

I was at a friends home a couple of weeks ago, and he was complaining about a virus on his computer. Try as he might, he could not get rid of this virus. I total look and thought I was able to remove it, but he said that the next day it came back.

I was commenting on a blog this morning when I saw that there were a number of comment author links that were NoFollowed, and a number that were not.  The blog owner was singling out comments for approval to allow the passing of link juice.

I’m pulling the trigger on something I haven’t had the guts to do before, but it’s long overdue. After nearly 3 years, I’m changing the permalink structure on my blog, although it’s not for the reasons you might think.

Besides search engine visibility, the more realistic answer is simple “user-friendliness”. People really aren’t that much different than search engine spiders when it comes to determining the relevancy of a link.

I came across a Wordpress plug-in called FAQ-Tastic , which allows users to submit questions to your website, and I’ve added it here.

You can create categories of questions, and even have different forms for people to ask questions about different subjects, with no apparent limit.

I get a lot of e-mails asking questions, and I frequently turn my replies into articles. That’s actually how my SEO 101 section came about long ago.

Replying can be quite time consuming, but not replying might be seen as rude, so I’ve now come up with a great compromise that adds a sort of “Web 2.0″ aspect to my site, and helps me easily generate new content.

People engaged in serious online marketing have long been taking advantage of Wordpress as a nearly perfect website platform to build and maintain websites for some time now.  Combined with cutting edge SEO plugins, it’s unstoppable, in my opinion.

Meanwhile, others engaged in serious PPC  testing have been taking advantage of Google’s Website Optimizer too.  Accessible right from your Adwords console, you can use it to split test your headlines, text and images for your landing pages.