SEO For WordPress Permalinks
For SEO, McDougall Interactive recommends using the “custom” option in your WordPress Permalinks settings, and typing in “/%category%/%postname%/” into the text box. This will create a URL like “http://www.domain.com/blog/category-name/post-name/”, which is ideal in most cases. Just be sure that you don’t use the same Title on a post more than once. Play the video above for more details.
Good advice, but doesn’t this preclude you from using multiple categories in a post? What does WordPress default to in that case?
That’s a good question, Paul. If you put the post in multiple categories, WordPress will choose one category for the Permalinks URL. WordPress usually defaults the category in the Permalink to the last category chosen for the post. You can also manually change the permalink with the “edit” function if you don’t like WordPress’ default. Usually, a post will have a “main” category which you can use in the URL, but it’s fine for it to reside in an additional category or categories if that makes sense. It does mean you have to be a little more careful and cautious about choosing your categories, and especially with changing the category after the post is already published and indexed by the search engines. But I feel that the SEO benefits of having the category in the Permalink URL outweighs these issues, as long as you have set up good SEO categories and you can take the extra time to be careful with your categorizing.
If that’s not possible, using just the post name in the Permalinks, or even the date and postname, is a reasonable alternative, especially if you are clever with including the keywords in your post names.