Optimizing URLs in Wordpress

Optimizing URLs is the first of the several golden rules of SEO. Though search engines now seem to follow correctly URLs like http://site.com/?p=1, it's always preferable to build SEO-friendly URLs. Wordpress allows you to do so in its section on permanent links. However, the sample URLs provided by default are not really SEO-friendly. First, you should not use dates on your URLs. Dates are difficult to remember and are a frequent cause of typos. The best thing to do is to split your URL following the hierarchical order of your site. Categories are the first-class member of a good URL. So if you have a category called products and a detailed description of a specific product, you should use:

http://site.com/products/product

Of course you can be even more specific with your category nomenclature. To get this URL in Wordpress, simply add this custom structure:

%category%/%postname%

If you don't want to use categories as the first class members of your URLs, you can use an URL like this:

http://site.com/product

So if your site is about movies, you'll get http://movies.com/lord-of-the-rings. To get this URL in Wordpress, add the following custom URL structure:

%postname%

Finally, if you want to serve your pages with an .html extension, thus getting the maximum benefits in terms of SEO-friendly URL, just use this:

%category%/%postname%.html

or:

%postname%.html

In both cases you will have a structure like http://site.com/products/product.html or http://site.com/product.html, respectively.