A neat feature of IIS 7 is the free module provided by Microsoft which can rewrite your URL before it gets served to clients.  You can specify the rules for rewriting URLs in your web.config file hosted on your website.

This is advantageous when using Wordpress since SEO is critical to leverage the use of your Blog.   Now the next section I will describe in detailed steps to setup your Wordpress blog to take advantage of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

Step 1: Download the Microsoft URL Rewrite Module 2.0 for IIS 7 – Click here to download the file

Step 2: Run through the wizard to configure this on your web server

Step 3: Create a web.config generic file in your Wordpress blog directory

Step 4: Add the following URL rewrite rule into your web.config file:

  <system.webServer>
    <rewrite>
      <rules>
        <rule stopProcessing=”true”>
            <match url=”.*” />
            <conditions logicalGrouping=”MatchAll”>
                <add input=”{REQUEST_FILENAME}” matchType=”IsFile” negate=”true” />
                <add input=”{REQUEST_FILENAME}” matchType=”IsDirectory” negate=”true” />
            </conditions>
            <action url=”index.php/{R:0}” />
        </rule>
      </rules>
    </rewrite>
</system.webServer>

Step 5: Open your Wordpress blog and goto Settings -> Permalinks

Step 6: On the custom textbox enter the following value: /%category%/%postname%/

Step 7: Click update to amend your changes and now you will notice that your blog posts will have a URL rewritten to “yourdomain/Investment/Is-2009-right-time-to-invest” instead of the generic URL of “yourdomain.com/blog/?p=30”.

Well that is it you can see it is quite simple to take advantage of using IIS 7 URL rewrites to gain SEO benefits on your Wordpress blog.  With previous versions of IIS 6 it would require you to purchase an additional ISAPI DLL and install this onto your IIS server.  With IIS 7 Microsoft have capitalised and made this feature easily integrate in with the web-server which was once of the selling points for me to abandon from using Windows 2003 IIS 6 and move towards web hosting utilising Windows 2008 IIS 7.

If you are interested in web hosting or are considering moving your website onto Windows 2008 IIS 7, then perhaps we can help.  Contact Click IT Solutions now and speak with a consultant who can assist you with the migration process.  You can contact us at (02) 9029 5194 or alternatively contact us via email at info@clickitsolutions.com.au.

If you have any comments or questions please don’t hesitate to contact us via email at info@clickitsolutions.com.au.