Reader’s Questions – Permalink structure and Indexing problems

Maneesh asks me a question.

My permalink structure is
“/index.php/%year%/%postname%/”
I was wondering if this would have a bearing on my seo efforts.. my site is
indexed with about 5 pages of links on google now..

This question may be of interest to other bloggers(Wordpress guys) too.

Tweaking your permalink structure is the first step to make your wordpress blog SEO friendly. Read how to do it here.  

To answer Maneesh – I see that 10 pages are indexed on Google at the moment from your site. I hope you have only 10 posts on your blog, if you have more, then there’s something wrong, since they are not indexed on Google.

Well, let me clarify something first. There are two issues here.

One – Indexing the number of pages on Google.

Two- Your permalink structure.

Answer to Indexing your pages on Google.

This has very little to do with your permalink structure. All you have to do is create a sitemap and submit it to google. You can find the instructions here.
Within a few days (according to your crawl frequency) all of your pages will be indexed on Google.

Answer to permalink structure.

Your pages appear to be in “almost” SEO friendly nature. The problem I see here is the index.php extension. You should get rid of it.

Go to your dashboard > Options > Permalinks

Select the “Custom” radio button and change the structure to this.

/%category%/%postname%/

or

/%year%/%day%/%postname%/

That should be it.

Bonus tip

If you’d like to submit a sitemap to Google, every time your content changes(new posts) just add this plugin(All in one SEO) and submit the sitemap to Google on Webmasters tool. This should take care of your indexing problems in the future.