How to get custom permalinks in Wordpress to work

Setting up custom permalinks in Wordpress is an important part of optimizing your site for search engines.  If you click around to different pages on this page, check out the URL if you don’t know what I am talking about.  This may seem simple with the permalinks option in Wordpress, but you may have discovered after selecting a permalink format of your choice, links to the rest of your pages begin to break.  I have seen countless plugins that claim to resolve this issue, but there is actually a much easier fix:

1.  You must have a .htaccess file in your site’s root directory.  This should (and probably was) included in your default setup.

2.  You must have the file permissions of .htaccess set to 666.  This is what allows the .htaccess file to be modified by Wordpress.  If you are using an FTP client, simply right click the .htaccess file and select ‘file attributes’.  Now, simply check the corresponding boxes or fill in 666.  Click ok, and you are all set.