WordPress Permalinks: What's the Best Choice?
I can tell you what the wrong choice in terms of SEO is and that’s keeping the “http://yourblogdomain.com/?postnumber” that is the WordPress default. It doesn’t tell folks or search spiders anything about the post, except what number the post is.
Your SEO-friendly permalink will include your keyword rich title as well as the post number, and it should look like this:
/%post_id%/%postname%/
You can add the category (/%post_id%/%category%/%postname%/) in addition to or instead of the post ID #, but you should only do that if your categories are set up as your main keywords. A “General” category, for example, won’t help at all.
To change your permalink from your WordPress dashboard, you simply go to Settings, then Permalink.
You’ll see them right at the top of the page. Click on “Custom Setting,” and either fill in what you want or copy and paste the above.
However, this is something that should be considered when you start your blog. Do NOT alter your permalink structure if your blog is old or you’ll lose all SEO goodness that you have built up for ALL of your previous posts.
If your blog is new and you don’t have too many posts, change it now. It will be well worth the effort and help your SEO efforts.
To assure that your permalinks will be crawled and indexed, you should also have an XML Sitemap in place. You can get the XML Sitemaps plugin at http://WordPress.org/extend/plugins.
