Wordpress: Change Permalinks

At my photoblog, I don't get as much traffic as I should. The reason is that the posts are identified by their postid ( /%post_id%/ ). As a result the urls are not keyword heavy and get lower rank. You will struggle to find any of those posts coming up top for any search.

It's better to have posts identified by their names ( /%postname%/ ). I decided to go ahead and take the plunge and make the switch. Changing wordpress permalinks is a piece of cake. With the more recent versions you don't even have to edit your .htaccess file to switch from one kind of permalink structure to another. But there is a catch: what happens to the links that are already there and have been indexed by the spiders? They will now generate 404 errors.

I was sure there would be at least one plugin that can translate the old URLs into the new scheme. If the worst comes to worst, I thougt I could just create a few URL rewrite rules to take care of it. But there was a plugin that can translate the urls. It's named Dean's Permalink Migration plugin and it looks like it works.