Wordpress Permalinks SEO Best Practice

Setting up a permalinks structure in Wordpress one of the things I normally do right after installing a blog, before event getting started on the templates. However, I always seem to forget what to put in the box so I thought I would put this here to remind myself and to go over the best practices on your own site in terms of SEO.

To set the permalinks on your Wordpress install go into Settings > Permalinks and enter the following into the Custom Structure field.

/%postname%-%post_id%.html

This will make a post on your site have a URL something like this.

/this-is-a-new-post-2.html

It is also possible to create a permalink using the category slug by using the %category% option.

/%category%/%postname%-%post_id%.html

So the post above would become the following.

/news/this-is-a-new-post-2.html

This makes sense as you will more than likely create a category with a good keyword structure, but can't always justify adding the keyword into the post title. There are a few other parameters that can be used here, including %author%, %year%, %monthnum%, %day%, %hour%, %minute% and even %second%. In my opinion the only one of any real value in terms of SEO here is %author%, although your authors would have to have some very specific names. Just be careful that you don't add too much to your permalink structure or your URL will be very, very long and completely defeat the point of the exercise.

Adding in the post ID will make the URL of the post completely unique, which is good for SEO, but will also stop Wordpress falling over when posts, pages and categories all have the same name. Adding in the post ID is also good if you want your posts to appear in Google News, although other factors are involved.

Adding a file extension to the end of the URL might have no effect in terms of SEO, but I am old fashioned enough to quite like it.