A lot of people who are into search engine optimization vary on this. Personally I use /%postname%/ and set it up for my own clients. Why?

It is easy and contains the keywords necessary for the optimal search. I am not known as an expert, but I have built quite a few sites that have improved well through ranking. I believe this has been the best. I know there are people that like %postname%.html and /%category%/%postname%/.

Why is it not as great to put the date or category in the URL structure?

Well, you are telling the search engine that the day and the category are more important than the article itself. For those who write tutorials and helpful topics, it is not the date or category that people are looking for in the search engine.

The great thing about WordPress is that is is easy to choose a custom structure and while posting, you can have a page slug that sums up the article, while the actual post name is longer. A lot of times this is to focus on keywords.

By the way, I really think that if you have not, you should check out Matt Cutt’s article Straight from Google: What You Need to Know. If you noticed, Matt Cutts uses a post name structure, but he also utilizes custom slugs where his URL path contains keywords the sums up his post, and his title is different. The article contains a slide show and video too. Another person I recommend that has a lot of experience is Joost de Valk.

What permalink structure do you use for your website and why? Any SEO tips for WordPress users?

As Wikipedia defines canonicalization, especially for search engines and search engine optimization (SEO):

In web search and search engine optimization (SEO), URL canonicalization deals with web content that has more than one possible URL. Having multiple URLs for the same web content can cause problems for search engines – specifically in determining which URL should be shown in search results.

For example, WP Addict could be listed as:

http://www.wpaddict.net

OR

http://wpaddict.net

The problem is that is that search engines merely split the content results between the two URLS if I were a person to be wishy washy and not define where users and search engines should be linking. I have to determine the primary entry point to the site, which in my case would be http://wpaddict.net.

You want the search engines to find one place to your site and not fragment visitors who have come in from a search engine in any way with a slightly different from the main URL of your site. Some people fear that this could cause duplicate content.

There are a couple ways to help with this in WordPress

1. .htaccess – You are telling your own server that you are hosted on where your main URL is at. Add the following into your .htaccess file:


RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^YOURURLHERE\.URLEXTENSION$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.YOURFULLURLHERE/$1 [R=301,L]


Replace YOURURLHERE with your URL name and URLEXTENSION with your extension like .com, .net, .org, etc….

Replace YOURFULLURLHERE with your full URL name, and no, you do not need to put it in uppercase as I have. Lowercase may be best.

2. Your can download Joost de Valk’s WordPress plug called Canonical URLs.

Please note that Google does not penalize for duplicate content, rather more so if you spam. So, if you are a blogger who has allowed a person to cross post an article on another site, you might not be penalized. However, you will be penalized if you are posting your material in places that are not relevant to your article(s).

Do you have any other solutions to canonicalization for your WordPress Blog?