Perfect Permalinks

[AlexNewell]

Having recovered from Permalink Panic (see Post) thanks to Chris and Loretta I can now choose the permalinks I want.

What's your advice for permalinks?

I normally use

/%category%/%postname%/

on yoast.com the advice is - post title, blog name

(http://yoast.com/40-wordpress-optimisat ... mpaign=rss )

So what do you use and why?

Thanks!

Alex

[cwboaze]

Hi Alex,

well now, I use

/%postname%

the reason why, is pure SEO.
it's the best thing you can use for getting
the search engine to index quality URL's
very friendly.

the problem is probably 4/10 plugins will
fail using this, because their use of the
permalink can break your system.

Now, before using /%postname% I used,
/archives/%post_id% and didn't get as good
results by search engines as postname.

now if you have /%postname%/ it can break
plugins as well, even more. because it has
trouble with some plugins adding // on URL's.

[AlexNewell]

Thank you Chris.

I want the best SEO possible to get targetted traffic and /%postname%/ is a good 'en

When you say

"the problem is probably 4/10 plugins will
fail using this, because their use of the
permalink can break your system."

are you referring to the redirect plugin you advised or the permalink system I usually use?

All The Best

Alex

[cwboaze]

Hi Alex,

nope not that plugin!, it's more of the difficult plugins
like Video plugins, and plugins using the permalink
structure to create SEO links for their services.

and it's

/%postname%

not

/%postname%/

/%postname%/ creates problems with it's extra,
trailer trash, "/"

I was looking through this boards, Show off your blogs
and right many people use this permalink structure,
I personally like it and use it on all my blog.

A Additional must have plugin if your going
to use this structure or shoot any structure, is
the Google-Sitemap plugin, you talking about
search engine traffic

The only visual difference, between
/%postname%/ & /%postname%

is this

If you use /%postname%/

your URL Looks like this:
yourdomain.com/blog/blog-post-name/

and if you use /%postname%

your URL looks like this:
yourdomain.com/blog/blog-post-name

[AlexNewell]

Thanks Chris.

Yeah I do have the Google Sitemap plugin. I'm not too worried about videos although I normally get YouTube vids working with little or no bother.

Thanks for the heads up about the trailing slash!



Alex

[James Schramko]

using the category will get you some nice rich category silos to bring in deep link traffic. It is going top be very strong for search engines.

[tknoppe]

Here's a pretty good article on this topic: http://tomuse.com/optimal-wp-url-organi ... cture-seo/

[cwboaze]

nice article!

[lindastacy]

When I started my blog several years ago I didn't make the wisest choice for permalinks, but I feel like changing now might have more negative than positive effects. Mine is /%archives%/%postname%/ and then I edit the postname to just the main words of the post title. I'd like to get rid of "archives" and have either just the postname or category/postname.