Permalinks in Worpress which format?

[danjensen]

I was thinking about this yesterday and then found the option to change it.

Can some one please confirm I should be using page name in my perma links please?

[jasonmorgan]

yes, you should set it to custom to show the post title and not an ID number.

[Marit]

To add to what Jason said:
Yes, you can either set the permalink to say: %category%/%postname%.php, or if you do not want to list the category , then you simply write %postname%.php

The reason why you would do this is to get the post name (and also the category name if you so wish) in the URL of each post, so you get more keywords in the actual post URL.

Marit

[Tom Goodwin]

Originally Posted by Marit

To add to what Jason said:
Yes, you can either set the permalink to say: %category%/%postname%.php, or if you do not want to list the category , then you simply write %postname%.php

The reason why you would do this is to get the post name (and also the category name if you so wish) in the URL of each post, so you get more keywords in the actual post URL.

Marit

If my domain name is already very targeted (which it is in the vast majority of cases), i personally just use %postname%, but if it is a broader domain name and i'm looking to rank for more narrow keywords, I will add in the category as well to give me that keyword boost.

[nettech]

I generally use these two;

/%category%/%postname%.html - Generic sites
/%postname%.html - SItes which have the keywords in the domain.

[askloz]

%postname%/ is better

[steveniam]

Agreed. I use postname only as it is much shorter and sweeter . To include category or others will make it too long.

Originally Posted by askloz

%postname%/ is better

[papagiorgio]

I cast my vote for /%postname%/.

If you anticipate growing the blog and believe that you will have multiple posts with the same post title then you would want to use /%post_id%/%postname%/.

[askloz]

no need to add the first forward slash, it's already hard coded in the WP platform.

as for the other suggestion, no need to do that either, that's where the all-in-one-seo plugin comes in

[askloz]

yeah, but that's not the main reason why I suggested it.

I've noticed that the big G prefers it when applying page rank.

Like, domain.com/ is treated differently as domain.com/index.php and domain.com is treated differently as well, as well as dub-dub-dub.domain.com (with www dots) are treated differently.

any hows, i found that my page rank was higher on %postname%/ than %postname%.html etc. it would appear they favor directory folders more over page names with php, htm, html, etc file extensions...

plus the proximity of k/w's are much higher.

Originally Posted by steveniam

Agreed. I use postname only as it is much shorter and sweeter . To include category or others will make it too long.

[euhlir]

I prefer to keep it short and simple with just the postname.

[danjensen]

hmm I had hoped al in one seo would have done it but i have it enabled and it only shows post numbers no SEO

thanks for all the great advice guys, cat and post name was a bit over the top so i will go with just post name.

[kkchoon]

Originally Posted by euhlir

I prefer to keep it short and simple with just the postname.

Agreed! I once use very long name, it is very hard to build backlinks on some authority site !

[WareTime]

On the couple wordpress sites I do have I use %postid% keeps the urls nice and short. Twitter short. I refuse to use /spammy/keyword/laden/longer/than/necessary/urls/that-look-like-ass/. I probably would use %postname% in wp except I hate having to hand edit each one to get it down to a reasonable amount of words.

The keyword in the domain is where it's at the keyword in the rest of the urls is a VERY VERY VERY minor in it's ranking boost. The big SEOMOZ report said as much. When Johnathon Leger said don't overdo it with keywords, if you read the article, it specifically talked about too many keywords in the url, rather than in the content.

Even if you strongly believe (and there is a lot of evidence that it truly matters not in any significant way) that the keywords in the url help, how many backlinks does it take to trump the keywords in the url? Not very damn many. Keywords in the url are pawns. Links are knights, rooks, bishops, queens and kings.

For my static / non cms sites I generally use a single word or two at most with a hyphen if it's two words that is/are the main keyword of that page. If everything is not at the root level and for my larger sites it isn't. I use domain/topic/keyword.html. I think more than one hyphen in a url is spammy looking.

These days the search engines don't need much help from us to figure out what a page is about. In my opinion as users are over exposed to super long spammy urls leading to spamtacular sites, my way keeps improving and improving because people start to pass those by and start clicking on reasonable looking urls.

[KiDkillER]

Changing the post number in URL to something you want. I used to use this form for my permalinks, %postname%.php. It looks professional

[askloz]

if you get a 404 error, why not put a product on it make it look like a landing page

[Tom Goodwin]

Originally Posted by nettech

I generally use these two;

/%category%/%postname%.html - Generic sites
/%postname%.html - SItes which have the keywords in the domain.

Copycat ...

[clickbump]

Originally Posted by euhlir

I prefer to keep it short and simple with just the postname.

ditto!

/%postname%/ on all my wp sites

[InternetMarketingIQ]

/%postname%.html

Is my preferred because there are so many ordinary people that will link to you and expect some kind of "closure" when creating the link. .php .htm works fine as well. It just finishes the URL for non marketers. Although not required I believe there is benefit to doing it this way and there is no downside that I know of. Google doesn't care about the domain extension so it doesn't hurt you.

[danjensen]

thanks guys that really helped my understanding of permalinks.

For some sites I have used it for others I haven't

[fthomas137]

Another thing to think about...

I've used /%category%/%postname%/ and /%postname%/ successfully.

But I recently ran across a problem with creating sites that permit affiliate linking to it, so I changed it to /%postname% and all is well. I would recommend stripping off that last / or put on the .php.

This permits future growth for adding in affiliate linking in the URL or stat analysis on the URL as well.

Frank