Dean’s Permalink Migration Plugin Revisited

WordPress has a nifty inbuilt feature that can be customized for preference and SEO. This feature is called the permalink structure. To navigate to the WordPress permalink update feature you will have to login in to your admin section and then click on Options as seen below.

As you can see I circled the Permalink tab with a red pen to show you were to click next. The below screen is what you will see once you click through.

You have 4 options to alter your permalink structure which is really your post appearance and how the URL will show once the post goes live. For SEO purposes it is advisable to use the following:

This is the best way to get a highly optimized keyword post ranking high in the search engines.

But sometimes when we first start out blogging we have no idea about permalink structure optimization and just choose something. When we eventually discover that we chose the wrong one all along we accept our “fate” since changing the links half way through blogging would mess up all our existing links.

There Is Help with Dean’s Permalink Migration Plugin

This Plugin allows us to update our permalink structure without breaking our existing links. The Plugin will create a 301 redirect to tell the search engines that you changed your link structure which will not affect your page rank and your traffic.

Nothing will change for you, except maybe better search engine rankings. Once installed, all you need to do is to activate Dean’s Permalink Migration Plugin and then:

1. go to admin panel->options->PermalinksMigration.set the old permanlink structure of your site.
2. go to admin panel->options->Permalinks.change the new permalink structure to what you want. (personally I recommend /%category%/%postname%/)
3. That’s it, your are done!

Visit the Plugin homepage and download the zip file to get started.