One of the first things you should do on a new WordPress install is to update your permalinks, and it’s really not very hard, but one of the things that gives people problems is that their .htaccess file isn’t writable.

If you’re on an Apache host, you most likely have mod rewrite, and you most likely already have an htaccess file, in my experience.

The first thing you need to do is make sure that your htaccess file is writable, and this can be done with your FTP software or your file manager inside your web hosting control.  Read the full post.

Changing the permalinks structure on an existing WordPress blog can be dangerous if you don’t know what you’re doing.

Once you have an established URL structure, a change can cause you to not only lose search engine visibility, but all of your PageRank will drop to zero, and all of your inbound links will no longer work. That can’t be good!

Additionally, if all of the page names in the search engines index cease to exist, then anyone that ever clicks on one of your Serps would be taken to a 404 error. That’s bad!  Read the full post.